Ursula Arnold

Ursula Arnold (born Ursula Musche: 10 March 1929 – 24 May 2012) was a German photographer. Much of her best known work involves street scenes in Berlin and Leipzig produced during the German Democratic Republic years. Living under a one-party government which valued visual artistry as a device for influence and control over the people, she was described as "one of those artists who could not easily be integrated". She said (in 1990): "If I ask myself if there's a different reality for me [as a woman rather than as a man], then the answer is [one to a different question]: not to belong to the rulers. My sympathies belong to those who are not part of the ruling establishment".

Biography 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. Her father, Walter Musche (1898–1983), worked as a self-employed photographer. In 1948 she passed her school final exams (Abitur), by now determined to follow in her father's footsteps by becoming a professional photographer herself.

Ursula Arnold's photography was decisively influenced by her critical evaluation of the reality of the German Democratic Republic, where photography was often used as a means of political education. Oppositional points of view that did offered an alternative image to that provided by the authorities were rejected. Ursula Arnold was an artist who could not so easily be integrated into such a system. The commentator Franziska Schmidt wrote an introduction for an exhibition dedicated to Ursula Arnold in the Berlinische Galerie that Arnold's pictures "illustrate the quiet and concealed sides of life, where the individual is jusr concerned with him/herself and the everyday worries. 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".

A recurring theme during much of her career was real-life images of city life in Leipzig and Berlin. Some of her most important pictures were taken during the 1980s in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. Then for several years after reunification Arnold photographed only landscapes in the countryside surrounding the German capital.