Mari Mahr

Born 1941

Mari Mahr was born in Santiago, Chile in 1941, where her Jewish family had emigrated to from Hungary to escape persecution during the Second World War. Her father was a Bauhaus-trained architect and among her parents’ friends in Chile were the photographer Antonio Quintana and the writer Pablo Neruda. Mahr initially worked as a translator, but after the family returned to Hungary, she decided to train as a photographer at the School of Photojournalism in Budapest. She came to the UK in 1972 and enrolled at the Central London Polytechnic where she was able to explore creative photographic processes, and since then her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Serpentine Gallery, the Photographers’ Gallery and the Cambridge Darkroom. A retrospective of her work was held at the National Museum of Photography, Film and TV in Bradford in 1994.