Living Together, from Berlin to Bitterfeld: GDR and Small-Town Ambivalence and Hope in the Photography of Ute and Werner Mahler

Since the 1970s, Ute Mahler has chronicled the times and lives that have surrounded her, from the late GDR to today’s Germany. Born Ute Schirmer in Berka, rural Thuringia, on October 29, 1949, just weeks after the foundation of the socialist state, she effectively grew up alongside her native East Germany. Between 1969 and 1974 she trained in photography at Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts (HGB, the only photography school in East Germany) under Arno Fischer (1927–2011) and formed a professional and romantic partnership with fellow photographer Werner Mahler (b.1950), whom she married shortly afterwards. She has since worked as a freelance photographer, producing images for fashion and culture magazines and documenting the faces, spaces and radical transformations of her country throughout her lifetime—from the banal confinement of GDR life, via the radical novelty of “the free world” in the 1990s, to more recent confrontations with social transformations across the Federal Republic. Continuing an important humanist photographic tradition, Mahler takes after Fischer, her teacher in Leipzig, but also various international predecessors such as Robert Frank (1929–2019) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), whose works, displayed in West Berlin in 1955 as part of Edward Steichen’s touring The Family of Man exhibition, had a profound impact on East Germany’s photographic scene for years afterwards. Against the backdrop of today’s increasingly polarized, volatile Germany and a world dominated by sensationalist media, Mahler’s oeuvre gains profound import in attending to, and prompting empathetic contemplation of, perspectives and experiences often relegated to the obscure abstractions of history or peripheral geographies.

Particularly resonant in this regard are Mahler’s scenes of GDR life in Living Together (Zusammenleben, 1974–88) and 21^st-century small-town life in Small Town (Kleinstadt, 2015–18), co-authored by Werner Mahler. Despite their distinct contexts, striking echoes resound between the series’ explorations of ambivalent circumstances and inner lives of individuals marginalized by mainstream societal narratives. The former showcases intimate dimensions of GDR life generally unacknowledged by politicized or large-scale historical accounts, while the latter paints a meditative portrait of increasingly deserted small towns across 21^st-century Germany. Both pose expansive questions about how people live together, cast doubt, and find hope amidst societal challenges.

An ultra-conservative nationalist resurgence is currently sweeping through large swathes of Germany (in February 2025’s general election the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) won an unprecedented 20.8% of the vote), and the country’s political map is polarized between wealthier urban centers and more peripheral communities, as well as between the former East and former West Germanys (the AfD was the most popular party across the less populated former East). Read against the backdrop of these changes, Living Together and Small Town offer humanist insights into the recent experiential realities and social transformations behind such political developments. The latter series, in particular, reckons with small-town life during the early years of the AfD in Germany: founded in 2013, the party gained traction throughout 2015 and 2016, primarily in eastern states such as Saxony and Thuringia, with its provocative reaction to Germany’s refugee crisis. It capitalized on perceptions of economic and demographic stagnation, and social inequalities between east and west. It first won seats in the Bundestag in 2017 with 12.6% of the national vote. As 2025’s election result “risks turning East Germans’ sense of isolation into a self-fulfilling prophecy,” as political scientist Joachim Behnke warns, the Mahlers’ recent series offers a more comprehensive, compassionate vision of Germany beyond its urban centers than abstract statistics and political analyses can articulate.(Joachim Behnke, cited in Hanne Cokelaere and Lucia Mackenzie, “German election rekindles old divisions,”  Politico Europe, February 26, 2025. https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-election-rekindles-old-divisions/.) Last year, Ute and Werner Mahler were awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for “embodying the values of democracy.” Indeed, if documentary photography can, as their agency Ostkreuz asserts, “shape society by creating visibility,” theirs serves as a powerful means of grappling with several defining issues of recent history, our present age, and the years to come—in Germany and beyond.(Ostkreuz, “Agency.” Ostkreuz: Agentur der Fotografen. https://www.ostkreuz.de/en/.)

Ute Mahler, Living Together (Zusammenleben), 1974–88

Throughout the first decades of the GDR, Christopher Tannert describes how photography “meant chiefly press photography and photojournalism […] used to provide an uncritical image that supported the apparatus of power.”(Christoph Tannert and Joachim Neugroschel, “Another Country,” Aperture, no. 123 (1991): p.42.) By the late 1970s, however, it was starting to gain considerable attention as an artistic medium. Candice Hamelin identifies 1977 as a pivotal year in this regard in both Germanys, when photography was first granted its own section in documenta 6 in West German Kassel, and the East German state sponsored the exhibition Medium Fotografie in Halle/Saale.(Candice M. Hamelin, “The Diversification of East Germany’s Visual Culture,” In The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History, ed. Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), pp.227-249.) Identifying “a lineage between the avant-garde of the 1920s and East German photographers” and concluding a long-standing argument over photography’s artistic status, the latter show expanded interest in and possibilities for the medium throughout the GDR.(Ibid.) By this time, Ute Mahler and several contemporaries—such as Helga Paris and Gundula Schulze Eldowy—had started to experiment with photography as a means of subjective exploration and self-expression, and in the following years such pursuits would find expression in national and small-scale exhibitions. Uncertainty on the state’s behalf as to how to judge this newly acknowledged art form further widened the scope of creative production and exhibition, and enabled increasingly subversive documentation of GDR life beyond optimistic, affirmative visions of socialist society and its labors.

Mahler recalls how she “experienced reality differently to how it was presented in magazines and posters. That’s why I took pictures of life as I perceived it.”(Ute Mahler, interviewed by Michael Grieve, “Any Answers: Ute Mahler,” British Journal of Photography, March 29, 2021. https://www.1854.photography/2021/03/any-answers-ute-mahler/.) Between 1974 and 1988 she produced the series Living Together (Zusammenleben), photographing “authentic,” otherwise undocumented, dimensions of ordinary life around her: individuals and their surroundings across the GDR, from small-town Lehnitz where she grew up, to East Berlin where she later relocated. Rather than political critique or artistic innovation, Mahler was looking for truth: “At first, it was just a loose collection. But they all raised the same question: how do people live together? […] I was twenty or so years old. I wanted answers. I wanted to peek behind the façade of the official rhetoric of optimism. I was looking for the truth in the inner realm of people’s lives.”(Ute Mahler, cited in “The Lives of Others: Ute Mahler’s Images of the Real East Germany,” The Guardian, January 6, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/jan/06/ute-mahler-images-real-east-germany-in-pictures.) Motivated by existential questions, she “wanted to find something common and universal, […] something which revealed happiness, transience, hopelessness, resignation, or intimacy.”(Ute Mahler, in Sonia Voss, The Freedom within Us: East German Photography 1980-1989 (London: Koenig Books, 2019), p.13.) And she found such truths in individual encounters in unremarkable spaces: domestic interiors, vacant stretches of urban space, and recurring moments of quiet, suggestive thought. Though Mahler’s concerns were personal and sociological rather than explicitly political, her images assume dissident pertinence when considered in their societal context. While the state was promoting optimistic visions of socialist labor and collectivity, Mahler was immortalizing idle moments of stasis and individual contemplation, secession from the laboring collective. Her portraits accord their subjects individuality not generally endorsed by GDR ideology (where, Voss describes, “the singular was systematically sacrificed to the collective”) and their overall atmosphere tends more towards ambivalence, sometimes even doubt or stagnation, than acceptable socialist optimism.(Voss, The Freedom Within Us, p.7.) In retrospect, the general ambivalence documented in Living Together becomes a historically pivotal sentiment; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ensuing dissolution of the GDR resulted largely from growing civil objections to discrepancies between official rhetoric and the realities of life in the state—discrepancies Mahler had been identifying for over a decade.

Ute Mahler. Zusammenleben (Brandenburg), 1978. © Ute Mahler. Image courtesy of Ute Mahler.

Spatially, many of Living Together’s images depict cramped homes or apparently unremarkable public scenes rather than impressive visions of “progressive” urbanisms—the “wide horizons or long vistas” that Astrid Ihle identifies as characterizing official depictions of socialist urban landscapes.(Astrid Ihle, “Wandering the Streets of Socialism: A Discussion of the Street Photography of Arno Fischer and Ursula Arnold,” in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Cowley and Susan E. Reid (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p.91.) Foregrounding liminal spaces and moments in-between remarkable sights, Mahler’s work offers transgressively naturalistic perspectives on East German life. In 1978 Brandenburg, a girl seems to take critical stock of a wasteland strewn with rubble and lined with boarded-up houses. Abandoned bikes and even her deflated bubblegum suggest desertion and stasis. In 1980 Mecklenburg, a woman in a leather waistcoat and hot pants possesses an air of energetic purpose, but this is counteracted by a man languishing, eyes closed, beside her, and a vacant backdrop: an empty road and gravel expanse littered with puddles and potholes, populated only by an empty bus. Despite the abundance of open space in both images, lacking both the interest of urban landscapes and the idyllic, free associations of rural ones, these spaces stretch out in disconcerting contingency, at once cluttered and vacant. If socialist realism presented horizons as symbols of hope for the Communist future, Mahler’s wide white skies remain subversively ambivalent.

Ute Mahler. Zusammenleben (Berit L. and Daughter, Berlin), 1984. © Ute Mahler. Image courtesy of Ute Mahler.

Various evocative domestic visions meanwhile assert the limitations of socialist homes as spheres of autonomy and privacy. In 1984 Berlin, an apparently cramped domestic space is cruelly juxtaposed with a framed pastoral scene on the wall, and its inhabitant, Berit, stares with an unassured lowered gaze into the middle distance. A young woman in 1973 Leipzig stares intently, rigidly into unseen space, seemingly dissociated from her laughing husband and domestic surroundings. Such expressions recur through the series, ripe for subversive interpretations. Mahler has described how “many citizens withdrew into private life to escape the pressure of the state and create their own freedom,” and these indecipherable stares underline such an impenetrable autonomy of individuals’ minds—a radical assertion in Mahler’s context of state-enforced collectivism and ubiquitous surveillance.(Ute Mahler, interviewed by Jonas Cuénin, “Living Together in Former East Germany,” Blind Magazine, August 26, 2021. https://www.blind-magazine.com/en/stories/living-together-in-former-east-germany/.) Though the camera’s insight into the domestic sphere might disconcertingly echo Stasi surveillance of citizens in their homes, Mahler’s recognition of such inscrutable subjectivities, her suggestion of unknowable internal freedoms, defies supposed state omniscience and omnipotence. Rather than a form of surveillance, Mahler championed private photography as an assertion of resistant, expansive curiosity. Her subjects’ gazes beyond the photographs’ frames subversively suggest searches for something beyond their limited surroundings, and also call on viewers to extrapolate from their own gaze, to look beyond the photographs’ objectivity and read between—or beyond—their lines.

Ute Mahler. Zusammenleben (Public House, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), 1984. © Ute Mahler. Image courtesy of Ute Mahler.

Though Living Together was a personal, non-commissioned project and most of its images were shown only to close friends, if at all, some were published—primarily in the popular East German fashion and culture magazine Sibylle. And though Mahler has emphasized that she “was not looking for a sensation,” some of these images were rather explicit in their symbolism and suggestions.(Mahler, in Voss, The Freedom Within Us, p.13.) Images deemed too explicitly critical would be censored and might elicit reprimand or persecution by the Stasi, but visual ambiguity, subjective dictates and photography not being considered an official art form meant that implicitly critical images might slip through the net, particularly in the context of a fashion magazine. As Freddy Langer describes, “whilst state superiors accorded little importance to the women’s magazine, readers could perceive its images as invitations to nonconformism.”(Freddy Langer, “Warum denn in die Ferne ziehen. Bilder aus der Geschichte des privaten Lebens: Der Fotografin Ute Mahler zum Siebzigsten,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 29, 2019, p.16.)  One subtly critical image from Sibylle shows young newlyweds embracing before a wall decorated with Western packaging, for stockings, cigarettes and laundry detergent. What might at first seem comic assumes tragic overtones given the implicit value attributed to such scraps, symbols of inaccessible material wealth and foreign destinations. Langer perceives in this image Mahler’s appreciation of creative means of enduring limited circumstances: “with the greatest sympathy and without a hint of irony, she showed how people in the GDR dressed themselves, got along with things, and tried to shake off life’s dreariness by decorating their walls with boxes of Western washing powder.”(Ibid.) Another image shows a woman getting “glammed up” in a public house in 1984, ominously overlooked by a portrait of Erich Honecker. The General Secretary of the GDR presides with an air of divine omniscience and omnipotence over this woman’s life, an indisputable symbol of the state’s pervasive surveillance of its citizens. At the same time, however, this woman, and even the bold wallpaper behind her, testify to a glamour and excitement often absent in historical accounts of GDR life. Mahler has addressed this common misconception, one which her oeuvre resists: “Life in the GDR was not only simple and dark. We held lavish parties and celebrated our dignity as individuals.”(Mahler, interviewed by Cuénin, “Living Together in Former East Germany.”) These two images characteristically foreground human life and individuality beyond ideological fixations or limitations.

While several of her contemporaries pushed the limits to circulate politically critical images, Mahler has expressed that sensational exposure was never her greatest concern: “For me, a good photo was one that I had at home in a box, that I would show to friends and colleagues, whose judgment meant a lot for me, and that I put into an exhibition. We made money with other things […] But [such private projects were] our lifeblood.”(Ute Mahler, interviewed by Daniel Boese, “An Interview with Ute and Werner Mahler,” November 23, 2009. http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2009/11/an_interview_with_ute_and_werner_mahler/.) By the 1980s some private galleries were tolerated, meaning that independent photography could be exhibited, and in that decade Mahler’s works featured in around 60 exhibitions across the GDR. In many ways, GDR life was conducive to such existentially sustaining artistic pursuits. An exceptionally low cost of living allowed artists to withdraw somewhat from professional and governmental dictates, while Mahler has emphasized the “huge luxury” of time available, recalling how she “simply would wait a whole day for just one photo.”(Ibid.) Wolfgang Kil describes how, not motivated by commissions, profits or publicity, the “self-imposed mission” of independent East German photographers “had a liberating effect on one’s way of thinking and looking.”(Wolfgang Kil, “Ostzeit—the Director’s Cut,” in Ostzeit: Geschichten aus einem vergangenen Land. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), p.267.) Individuals simply pursued social and aesthetic questions that interested them, cultivating high-quality works “for nothing but photography’s sake.”(Ibid.) Indeed, Mahler asserts: “I made them for myself.”(Mahler, in Voss, The Freedom Within Us, p.13.) Rather than “straightforward” historical documentation, political allegory or sensationalism, Mahler’s images demonstrate an attentive concern with human experience and visual expression, both the product of and revealing themselves with slow, empathetic engagement, and containing expansive potential interpretations.

Ute Mahler. Zusammenleben (location and date unknown), 1974-88. © Ute Mahler. Image courtesy of Ute Mahler.

Far from a series simply “about GDR life,” Living Together is a heterogenous, compassionate appraisal of human individuality and vulnerability in a context where such existential realities went officially unacknowledged, and the lived nuances of which are often overlooked today. Some of its most striking and optimistic images, meanwhile, appear to transcend the GDR’s limits altogether. In scenes which could be anywhere—idyllic spaces beyond discernible spatial and temporal limitations—they powerfully identify moments of liberation, alternative modes of existence within East Germany. One such image showing figures sunbathing, dozing and embracing languorously amidst wild grasses and flowers stages a symbolic emancipation of its subjects, disassociated from the harsh or mundane exigencies of everyday life. The natural setting suggests a freedom beyond urban life’s associations and confines: work, the state and its institutions, ubiquitous surveillance. If socialist realism celebrated the dignity and value of labor, this photograph subversively asserts the pleasure of idleness. And such implications carry perhaps even more weight for present-day viewers, in a society where free time and rest are much rarer than they were under socialism. As Svetlana Boym recalls, an “excess of time for conversation and reflection was a perverse outcome of a socialist economy: time was not a precious commodity.”(Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p.xv.) In free time, then, Mahler’s subjects possess an alternative kind of freedom, despite their limited political and material contexts. And rural expanses offer further, if partial, liberation from such societal constraints.Mahler thus gestures towards more liberated modes of inhabiting time and space, demonstrating the universally utopian possibility in such pastoral idling. Viewers today might also do well to be reminded of the precious luxury of dozing with friends in a meadow in broad daylight.

Ute and Werner Mahler, Small Town (Kleinstadt), 2015–18

Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. Kleinstadt #127, 2015-2018. © Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. Image courtesy of Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler.

Fast-forward through several waves of political transformation into the 21^st century, and Mahler, in partnership with Werner Mahler since 2008, has continued to grapple with her contemporary moment and individuals’ experiences thereof. Unified Germany quickly refashioned itself as the future-oriented capitalist powerhouse of the European Union, but in many areas such progress has not been felt so acutely. In such places, the Mahlers continue to attend to individual realities often overlooked by mainstream narratives. Many of these “alternative” perspectives are found across the former GDR, and in rural or suburban areas—places and communities “left behind” by deindustrialization and Western- and urban-centric visions of a progressive new Germany. Between 2015 and 2018, the Mahlers produced the series Small Town, visiting over 100 unremarkable towns throughout Germany to reckon with this phenomenon: “from Arzberg via Bitterfeld, Hofgeismar, Pasewalk, Simmern, all the way to Wadern and Zehdenick.”(Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler, Kleinstadt (Stuttgart: Hartmann Projects, 2018), blurb.) Away from the fast-paced urban centers and scandals that so often dominate media output, the photographers drew attention to places where mundanity prevails: “A small town—an empty square, hardly any people, if there are any, then old people or young people, no sights worth seeing, empty shops, a slow process of decay, in the best case the charm of the morbid—you pass by only accidentally and ask yourself: Who is here when I am not, and why?”(Ibid.) Indeed, their subject matter is explicitly banal: familiar German street scenes, young people dressed unremarkably, getting up to nothing particularly noteworthy. The numbering of the photographs (Small Town #1, Small Town #2 etc.) accentuates this apparent generic blandness. With closer and contextual consideration, however, the Mahlers conjured a humanizing, thought-provoking picture of a peripheral yet increasingly pivotal swathe of German society.

Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. Kleinstadt #9, 2015-2018. © Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. Image courtesy of Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler.

Since reunification in 1990, many German Kleinstädte (settlements with between 2,000 and 20,000 inhabitants, somewhere between villages and cities) have suffered a mass exodus of inhabitants, typically the young and educated, to larger urban areas in pursuit of better infrastructure, employment and financial prospects. In 2015, only 15% of the German population lived in the former East German states, where the rate of unemployment was twice as high as, and average household wealth less than half of, that in the western states.(Deutsche Welle, “Two million fewer Germans in former East,” September 2015. https://www.dw.com/en/two-million-fewer-people-in-former-east-since-german-reunification/a-18749892.) Throughout many of these towns, a desolate emptiness prevails, as encapsulated in a shot of an empty bus stop in Small Town #127: various unattended rucksacks become stark symbols of desertion, an impression exacerbated by a vacant street beyond. As in many of the series’ images, an oppressively empty white sky fills nearly half the composition. Far from presenting a mythologized rural idyll, the Mahlers offer a frank account of life in such places. Unremarkable, often deteriorating buildings and concrete cluster in claustrophobic excess, but desertion and uneventfulness resound throughout the quiet monochromatic series. Glimpses of historic architecture recall the long histories of many of these towns, and call the future into implicit question. In 2018, the Mahlers recognized that “the future of these small towns will be decided in the coming years. The young people are their futures—if they leave, the town dies.”(Mahler and Mahler, Kleinstadt, blurb.) The slow pace of small-town life thus feels paradoxically urgent. Ultimately, photographic testimony might be the only means of combatting the absolute disappearance of such places; as Mahler’s photographs have kept sites and scenes of the GDR “alive” long after their material disappearance, so the couple now immortalize small towns on the brink of extinction and record intimate moments within another pivotal phase in recent German history.

Despite the intervening decades of supposed social, political and economic development, there is a distinctive continuity between Small Town and Living Together, regarding both style and subject matter. Echoes resonate through the nostalgic monochromatic palette, but perhaps most strikingly in the continued focus on vacant liminal spaces, car parks, street corners, and idle young people ambivalently contemplating their surroundings. One portrait of a young couple in Small Town #9 seems a present-day transposition of some of Mahler’s GDR portraits, as the pair stare with intense contemplation into an unseen middle distance, symbolically looking for something more, beyond the image’s confines. As the suburban landscape stretches out behind them, the lethargy that pervaded Mahler’s vision of the GDR is shown to still resound through Germany’s small towns. This continuity creates an impression of places “left behind” by the onward rush of progress elsewhere, namely in Germany’s constantly developing urban centers. Echoes of the same mundanity and ambivalence that characterized scenes in the GDR call into question narratives of indisputable progress made in the preceding decades since reunification. The sense of stasis and existential limitation that pervaded Mahler’s images of socialist Germany seems to persist within the 21^st-century country’s social and geographic margins, as small-town populations decline and demographic and economic disparities deepen between rural and urban communities. Nearly a decade later, Small Town’s broad survey remains highly topical as the effects of such feelings of decline are expressed in ever more acute political terms. The rise of the AfD across eastern Germany has demonstrated to a global audience how feelings of demographic precarity and social and economic marginalization play into the hands of far-right populist narratives—even in a country whose mainstream parties have for decades vowed to prevent a resurgence of extremism. As reactionary voices exploit a powerful—if vague—nostalgia fueled by such anxieties about the future, however, the stark echoes between Small Town and Living Together disallow any straightforward comparisons of a rose-tinted past and supposedly terrible present; Mahler’s visions of small towns in the 1970s and 80s contained near identical feelings of emptiness and uncertainty as those in the 2010s. Perhaps most crucially, meanwhile, both series also identify scenes of community and hope within banal daily life.

Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. Kleinstadt #52, 2015-2018. © Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. Image courtesy of Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler.

Small Town #52 shows another bus stop, this one populated by a cluster of young people. Bags on the floor and hands in pockets suggest an extended wait as the image foregrounds the isolation of such small towns, these young people’s existential dependency on regional bus routes. The setting brings an implicit anticipation—of movement elsewhere, or the future at large—while church spires beyond conjure a quiet historic town being left behind. Photographically immortalized, however, the bus stop seems to become a destination in itself; the liminal space of waiting becomes a scene of social life. In Small Town #67, meanwhile, a car park becomes another unconventional public forum for young people amidst uneventful surroundings. And the Mahlers approach such scenes not with condescension, but with curious, dignifying attention. In an unusually densely populated frame, they capture a wealth of interactions and emotions—from the pride of a smug car owner to that evoked by a Dortmund football shirt, from contemplative airs to playful grins. Ultimately, this vision of such towns and their inhabitants is not overly nostalgic or pessimistic. As Langer writes, “what they accomplish is photography of a regional homeland without pathos or malice, but rather shaped by sympathy and curiosity.”(Langer, “Warum denn in die Ferne ziehen,” p.16.) Despite some desolate surroundings, here is tight-knit community, and all life’s emotional richness and complexity. Indeed, the Mahlers identified distinct upsides of life in such places: “these places are biotopes in which life seems manageable. Where there is great community, but also strong social control. Where there are no attractions, the little things become exciting.”(Mahler and Mahler, Kleinstadt, n.p.) Meanwhile their focus on young people, as well as emphasizing a universal humanity at stake beyond abstracted demographic and political statistics, evokes anticipation and possibility, the inherent promise of youth. Amidst considerable contextual uncertainties, the pair remained optimistic: “We see hope. In the eyes of the young: the whole world. Narrowness and closeness. Life itself.”(Ibid.) Once again, the Mahlers identified a plurality of possibilities, rich emotional and social realities, within ostensibly limited societal and material circumstances.

Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. Kleinstadt #67, 2015-2018. © Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler. Image courtesy of Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler.

Nearly a decade on, following an election whose results Ute Mahler has described as “really disturbing,” and as the far right finds increasing support among younger (male) voters, perhaps such a sense of optimism no longer rings so true.(Ute Mahler, interviewed by Mia Butter, “Village Life: An Interview with Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler,” Berlin Art Link, March 10, 2025. https://www.berlinartlink.com/2025/03/10/ute-mahler-werner-mahler-interview-akademie-der-kunste-ein-dorf/.) But Small Town still offers thoughtful engagement with peripheral places and experiences often overlooked or abstracted, though found increasingly in Germany’s political limelight. In the face of political and social polarization fueled by sensationalist over-simplification of complex sentiments and positions, the Mahlers offer resistance in the form of patient, humanist consideration and imagination. Divisive political narratives rely on exactly the kind of reductive, alienating generalizations and dismissal that these photographs refuse. Avoiding sensationalism or reduction, the series’ extensive scope and patient subtlety demonstrate a compassionate commitment to capturing and understanding the nuances of life and its moods in such places, and proves that the full spectrum of emotional life can still be found beyond big cities, that such places and their populations remain worthy objects of artistic, empathetic and imaginative attention. Recognition and empathy might serve as productive starting points for countering political estrangement, while dignifying artistic representation and immortalization of such communities might assuage anxieties about societal invisibility and marginalization. Ultimately, rather than focusing on the demographic anxieties and political sentiments steadily growing in such places, these images find alternative perspectives and create space for curious reflection on such positionalities—the life and hope as well as the limitations to be found within them. Similarly to Living Together, Small Town celebrates the sense of community and solidarity, the time for contemplation and leisure that emerge in such spheres, worth considering as valuable potential alternatives to today’s typically fast-paced and individualistic urban mainstream.

In an era of increasing sensationalism and extremism, the nuanced contemplation and imagination prompted by these photographs become vital tools of cultural mediation. Empathetic recognition of a diverse array of lived realities and possibilities seems a modest but powerful first step in bridging deepening political and regional divides, in Germany and worldwide, and imagining alternative ways forward in today’s increasingly fractured world. Since the 1970s, the Mahlers have opened up spaces for reckoning with experiential realities beyond grand, often abstracted historical and political narratives, and for imagination of alternative ways of navigating the various social, political and existential precarities of our current moment. We cannot expect photographs to comprehensively articulate, explain or “resolve”highly complex societal phenomena, but Living Together and Small Town do provoke nuanced reflection on topical issues facing today’s Germany and world, against the grain of mainstream—often sensationalist or relentlessly “progress”-oriented—societal discourses. Transcending reductive and divisive political questions, their insight and curiosity facilitate slow, expansive critical reckoning with ways of living together. From the past to the present, from Berlin to Bitterfeld, the Mahlers’ oeuvres prompt nuanced reflection and imagination of a more socially cohesive and open-minded future, beyond the fast-paced and increasingly divisive extremities of political discourses worldwide.

Nina Follows

Nina Follows is a writer and researcher specializing in contemporary European art and modern literature. She is based in London, though often on the move. She holds an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art and a BA in Modern Languages (French and German) from New College, University of Oxford.