Portrait Workshop

Self-confident and poetic, shy, playful and direct, the people in the portraits by Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler look at the viewer. The images of the two OSTKREUZ photographers testify to the curiosity and attentiveness as well as the experience and empathy that characterize their photographic handwriting. As part of the current exhibition Dream On—Berlin, the 90s, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler are offering insights into their working methods and passing on their knowledge to interested parties in a two-day workshop at C/O Berlin. The workshop will focus on both practical work and the possibility of portfolio reviews. 

The artist couple are among the most outstanding German photographers. As co-founders of the photo agency OSTKREUZ, as artists and teachers, they have had a decisive influence on the developments and aesthetics of German photographic history. Their works range from socially critical reportages and landscape photographs to fashion photographs and a large number of portrait series – of well-known actors, politicians and musicians as well as people they meet on the street. 

Ute Mahler (b. 1949 in Berka, Thuringia) and Werner Mahler (b. 1950 in Boßdorf, Saxony-Anhalt) have known each other since their school days. Both studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig in the 1970s. Since then, they have worked independently of each other, both on journalistic commissions and on their own artistic projects. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, they founded OSTKREUZ — Agentur der Fotografen with five East German colleagues in 1990. In 2000, Ute Mahler took up a professorship for photography at the HAW in Hamburg. In 2004, Werner Mahler and Thomas Sandberg founded the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. The Mahlers have been working together on independent projects since 2008. In 2014, the Haus der Photographie – Deichtorhallen Hamburg dedicated a major exhibition to them, which was shown at the Fotomuseum Den Haag in 2019. In 2024, their joint works were presented at the Kunsthalle Erfurt. Together with 17 colleagues from the OSTKREUZ agency, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler received the Konrad Wolf Prize from the Academy of Arts in 2013, and in 2023 they were both awarded the Culture Prize of the German Photographic Society. In 2024, both will also receive the Federal Cross of Merit.