Artist’s + Curator’s Tour

Together with photographer Ute Mahler, who co-curated the show, Harald Hauswald gives insights into the works on display and the story behind them. In this special guided tour you will learn more about the conception of the exhibition and the conservation of Harald Hauswald's work.

As a co-founder of the photographers’ agency OSTKREUZ, Hauswald is one of the most important figures in German photography. In recent years, over 7,500 of his negatives have been conserved and digitalized by the Ostkreuz Association for Photography, supported by a major grant from the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany. The images shown in Harald Hauswald . Voll das Leben! Reloaded are invaluable as visual documents of East and West German history.

Harald Hauswald (b. 1954 in Radebeul, Saxony) is one of the most eminent East German photographers. Together with Sibylle Bergemann, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, and others, he founded OSTKREUZ – Agentur der Fotografen, a photographer-run agency. After completing a traineeship to become a photographer, Hauswald moved to East Berlin in 1978, where he worked as a telegram carrier in Prenzlauer Berg and for the Stephanus Foundation, among other jobs. From the early 1980s, he regularly published photo-essays in West German periodicals including GEO, Stern, Zitty, and taz, at first using a pseudonym and later under his own name. His work has been shown in over 250 solo exhibitions across Germany, the United States, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and has been published in diverse publications on East Berlin and everyday life in the GDR. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1997) and the Einheitspreis – Bürgerpreis zur Deutschen Einheit (Citizens’ Award for German Unity, 2006). Harald Hauswald lives and works in Berlin.

Ute Mahler, born in 1949 in Berka (Thuringia), completed her studies at the School for Graphic and Book Arts in Leipzig in 1974. She has been a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg since 2000. She is a founding member of OSTKREUZ and lives in Hamburg and Lehnitz, near Berlin.