In 1987 and 1988, photographers Ute and Werner Mahler traveled with journalist Wolfgang Kil to Lisbon with a clear objective: to create a book about this city at the western edge of Europe. The project was conceived as a travel book for the Leipzig-based publisher Brockhaus and was to be published in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

For the first time, these three GDR citizens were permitted to visit a Western country. Over several weeks, they explored Lisbon in search of both the extraordinary and the everyday.

During those years, Lisbon was beginning to experience profound transformations that mirrored the changes taking place across Portugal: the country had joined the European Union only a year earlier; and, for the first time since the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, Socialist Party dominance had come to an end. The victory of Cavaco Silva in the 1987 general elections signaled the rise of a new social‑democratic era.

The portrait of Lisbon captured by the Mahlers reveals a society in transition, a vision that acquires new resonance today. Their black‑and‑white street photographs took shape as two artists engaged with a city unknown to them yet full of inspiration.

Two years later, the Berlin Wall would fall, the GDR would cease to exist, and the book would vanish with them. The photographs and contact sheets from this unfinished project remained forgotten in boxes until their rediscovery in 2021.

Nearly forty years later, with the perspective of distance, presenting these previously unseen images to a Portuguese audience invites visitors to reflect: how have Lisbon and its people changed?

This reflection begins with an extraordinary visual record created by two of the most significant German photographers of the twentieth century.