[a][4] Ursula Musche was born in Gera, a few months before the Wall Street crash ushered in two decades of economic and political crises for (Germany), during which she grew up.
[6] Arnold then studied photography at the Fine Arts Academy ("Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst" / HGB) in Leipzig[1] between 1950 and 1955,[2] and emerged with a degree.
[6] After the war the central third of Germany (including Gera, Leipzig and the eastern half of Berlin) had found itself administered as the Soviet occupation zone.
At the academy in Leipzig the onset of the "formalism debate" during the early 1950s constrained the freedom of the teachers to discuss or depart from a curriculum which was uncompromisingly based on government strictures and official beliefs concerning "socialist imagery".
[5][6] The ambition to support herself and her child through working as a free-lance photographer in Leipzig proved unachievable, and in 1956 or 1957 Ursula Arnold moved to East Berlin.
[6] That day job still left time for her to continue with her freelance photography, capturing "people in city spaces [and] the sadnesses of daily life".
[6] Ursula Arnold, Evelyn Richter and Arno Fischer, continue to be seen by commentators as the three most important East German photographers of their generation.
Her pictures bring out the discrepancy between the ideological propagandist presentation of the optimistic individual as the battling hero of socialism and real life conditions".