[3] Increasingly successful commercially, Ludwig Schirmer was delighted that his daughter seemed to share his joy in photography, repeatedly insisting, "Ute, you're a [natural] photographer".
Ute knew she could never be an "establishment photographer" of publicity images, and was totally unaware of her father's (secret) portfolio of private work: as a teenager she therefore rejected his encouragement.
[3] After successfully completing her school career Ute Schirmer moved on to take an unpaid internship, which was a frequent prerequisite for university-level education in the German Democratic Republic, which had been left with a desperate shortage of working-age population thanks to the slaughter of war and mass emigration to the west during (especially) the 1950s.
Schirmer work was at the "DEWAG" [de], the party directed organisation that enjoyed a monopoly on advertising in East Germany.
[4][9] In 1969 she enrolled at the "Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst" (loosely, "Fine Arts Academy") in Leipzig, emerging in 1974 with a degree in photography.
[9][12] As a freelancer she also contributed fashion images to other publications including, after 1990, the Hamburg-based weekly mass-circulation news magazine Stern.
It did publish plenty of pictures which keen eyed readers could readily have construed as "political", but as Maher later explained to an interviewer, "...you have to be able to read images.
After reunification Ute and Werner Mahler were founder members of the Berlin-based "Ostkreuz" photography agency,[11] which operates under a co-operative ownership structure.
[6] Over two decades "Ostkreuz" has grown into one of Germany's most successful agencies, despite an underlying ethical basis that rejects the cancerous growth in populism and commercialism that have been features of the period.
[3] Every few years the members take stock of progress, with a new book and exhibition, examining from the perspective of the nation some of the fundamental societal issues of homestead, identity, old age and hope.
They can also be foundn the state gallery at the Moritzburg (Halle) and in Cottbus at the Brandenburg Region Museum of Modern Art [de; ru].
In determining the precise moment at which a situation becomes uncompromised and communicative, sometimes unexpected, sometimes even puzzling, Mahler moves outside the limits of photography which are generally assumed to be uncrossable.
In her pictures the visible elements provide just a thin outer shell, which quickly melts away as soon as the interest of the observer in the essential content of the image is awakened.
That ccntent often comprises elements that mere language can only describe in the vaguest of terms, such as joy, love, loneliness, emptiness and high-spiritedness.