Their melancholy droop tugs your eye. Houseplants, half-heartedly displayed in suburban windows, or silhouetted behind lowered blinds, captured with a large-format camera, in grave monochrome. Is this bathos? I can smell the dust on the flowers, the stiff buds and stalk-like grasses; feel the flesh of my fingertip give against a succulent’s pointed leaf. No, this is Kleinstadt, the most recent collaboration between German photographers Ute and Werner Mahler: a photo essay capturing life in more than 100 small towns in modern Germany as they succumb to dereliction. Those who grew up in a small town, like I did, will know this feeling, of being able to say “that’s me in the picture”. I’ve sat in those front rooms; I’ve watched those saucers of soil shrivel.
Elsewhere, two girls, immaculately made up, stand in the runnel between two houses, heads tilted together, a bare knee glinting through distressed jeans. Three boys, all in hoodies, hair identically styled in the same gelled side sweep, stand listlessly at the edge of a field. A bolus of suburban hedge looms, absurdly smooth, from a street corner. A row of teenagers, hands in pockets, haunt a decrepit bus shelter.
Kleinstadt is included in a retrospective of Ute and Werner Mahler’s photography at Fotomuseum Den Haag, the wider exhibition spanning almost fifty years of the couple’s individual and collaborative work. For decades, the Mahlers lived and worked in East Germany, co-founding the Ostkreuz photographers’ agency shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the GDR in the early 1970s, the only colour film available (from manufacturer Orwo) “stank”, unworkable for everyday use.
Their images are predominantly black and white, and, initially at least, this was born out of exigency: Those earlier photographs record daily life in the GDR in all its banality and its strangeness, with an almost defiant intimacy. Private lives are an important subject for both photographers; but even the private face could be, in the GDR, a gated one. The Mahlers’ unvarnished portraits and street scenes probe past the paralysing structures of the state, uncovering glimpses of ‘unofficial’ life. In one shot from Zusammenleben (1970s and 80s), a young, just-married couple perch on a bed beneath a sloping ceiling. The bride looks upwards, grinning; her dark, curling fringe matches her husband’s. Bizarrely, cut-out adverts and branded packaging – Persil, Omo – line the walls around the bed. In another shot, a fabulously coiffed woman smiles into her cupped hands. Two boys in knitted jumpers wriggle under the camera’s eye, while a sober companion stands, frowning, apart.
More intimate still are Werner Mahler’s portraits of coal miners (Bergbau, 1975). Naked men, slick with a high sheen of sweat and coal dust, are contorted against the pressures of their task. Any heroic overtones are undercut by the raw detail of the scene: the men’s penises, shrunk to coal-dusted buds, their pale, startling buttocks. What might have been trite shots—contented couples, playful children, stolid labourers—saturated in troubling ‘Ostalgie’ for a Socialist paradise, instead convey something much more ambivalent, and more complex. Posed, but relentlessly private; these are visual synecdoche, in which a fragment of the personal conveys the ineffable whole.
This ethos endures in later work, tackling 21st century disaffection: a new phenomenon of oppression. The Mahlers’ first official collaborative project Mona Lisas of the Suburbs (2009-2011) presents a series of portraits of young women in cities across Europe. There are strong portents of the later Kleinstadt images here: the focus on youth, the dispiriting backdrop, the equivocal expressions. Birna, in Reykjavik, stands unperturbed against an unfocused wasteland. Her dark hair is swept over from a parting at the extreme left of her forehead; her brows are severely sketched over slightly narrowed eyes. The paint on her nails is chipped, her arms crossed firmly below her breast in a stance which could speak equally of self- possession, or of self-consciousness. Like the famous sitter of the series’ title, these girls give little away.
But it’s Kleinstadt I’m drawn back to, its warning of slow, irresistible decline. If the Mahler’s earlier work shows the individual in a kind of silent dialectic with their environment, Kleinstadt exposes how unequal that struggle is—perhaps how it has always been. It’s the atmosphere of weariness, of not enough. And though these photographs were taken in Gandersheim and Lebach and Zörbig, they are instantly relatable; I think of the brief forays I make back to my own home town: the same aimless kids, the same empty shopfronts, gaping like missing teeth, the sense of slow abandonment, or entrapment. You are left with the understanding that the figures who populate these photographs are vanishing themselves; these places are haunted by an absence to come.
