From Arzberg to Zehdenick

With the Kleinstadt exhibition, the photographer couple, Ute and Werner Mahler, are presenting a new joint project and their third joint publication, Kleinstadt. The expedition into the German hinterland will be on display at the Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin to March 16, 2019.
Ute and Werner Mahler (born 1949 and 1950), were key figures in photography in the former GDR, and co-founded the renowned photography agency Ostkreuz after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After having pursued successful, independent careers for decades, the couple presented their first joint project in 2011, a series of black and white portraits titled Monalisas of the Suburbs. In 2014, a second joint project followed, The Strange Days, a series of large format landscape studies.
The couple is now presenting Kleinstadt (published by Hartmann Projects), a visit to the small German town, made up of pictures taken in many small towns: from Arzberg over Bitterfeld, Hofgeismar, Pasewalk and Zimmern to Waden and Zehdenick. “We’ve been interested in this topic for a long time. We already worked in suburbs and prosaic places for some of our previous projects. We wanted to visit towns that are not in any travel guide and that are too far from the highway for people to pass through,” Ute Mahler explains in an interview with ZEIT Magazin. “These places are biotopes where life seems manageable; where there is great community, but also strong social control. Places where there are no attractions, so that small things become exciting.”

Further information at: Robert Morat