Mari Mahr

Mahr, Mari (b. 1941), Chilean-born British photographer. After working as a photojournalist in Budapest in the 1960s she moved to London in 1972. Dreams, memory, history, fantasy, and magic-realist humour resonate within her enigmatic, black-and-white, multi-layered observations, generally presented as series. Everyday objects—a chair, a metronome, candles, twine, pot plants—are rendered strange through unexpected juxtapositions of scale within the picture or through shifts in angle of vision. The pictures are assembled from details, originally by means of multiple exposure, later using digital tools. Titles sometimes invoke particular persons or places: the Russian Futurist artist Lili Brik, for example, or a stay in Geneva, although the imagery remains open to multiple interpretations. Her work is personal, and often concerns matrilineage, most particularly in the series Between Ourselves (1991-2; pub. 1998), which includes homage to her daughter, mother, and grandmother.

— Liz Wells