"Ute Mahler (born 1949 in Berka) is among the most stylistically influential photographers from East Germany. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she and other chroniclers of life in East Germany founded Ostkreuz, today's most successful photographers' agency. Over forty years ago she began her series Zusammenleben (Living Together) which subtly captures the different ways that people experience everyday life with one another, while revealing what is insinuated by left unsaid. Her black-and-white photographs are gentle yet unflinching depictions of life in former East Germany. In 1988, sensing that she had seen enough of this subject matter, Mahler stopped gathering images showing innumerable variations of the constellations of men, women, children, friends, and strangers that she repeatedly encountered. Now her images--true testimonies of a past era--are being published for the first time in book form."--Insert.