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Arwed Messmer (born 1964)[1] is a German photographer and artist, based in Berlin.[2] His work primarily uses recontextualised vernacular photographs of recent historical events, found in German state archives, in order to pose questions about photography.[3] He mainly produces books of this work, often with Annett Gröschner on the time of a divided Germany, but also exhibits it.[3]
Messmer won the Otto Steinert Prize from the German Society for Photography in 1996, was co-winner (with Gröschner) of a DAM Architectural Book Award in 2011 and 2012, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2018.
Messmer was born in 1964 in Schopfheim in the district of Lörrach, Germany.[2] He moved to Berlin in 1991.[3]
His work over the course of 25 years has dealt with issues surrounding German post-war history.[4] For the latter 10 years he has worked primarily with utilitarian images produced by the state, that he has found in a number of archives.[4]
In 1994 and 1995 Messmer made a series called "Potsdamer Platz, Anno Zero" (Potsdamer Platz, Year Zero).[3] Potsdamer Platz was an important public square and traffic intersection in the centre of Berlin that was totally destroyed during World War II and then left desolate during the Cold War era when the Berlin Wall bisected its former location. Messmer's series is concerned with this period, before it became the site of major redevelopment projects.[3]
Messmer's 2014 book Reenactments MfS uses photographs of re-enactments of escape attempts across the Berlin Wall, and crime-scene exhibits, sourced from the Stasi Records Agency.[3] The images were made in the course of crime investigations by the Ministry for State Security (MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, the official state security service of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).[3] Re-enactments were "often restaged with participation by the actual escapee after they were caught".[3] Messmer provides new contexts for the photographs and removes their captions.[3] The book also includes Messmer's "Revisited Places" series of photographs that he made in 2014.[3]
Messmer's 2016 book Zelle/Cell is about the West German far-left militant organisation the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group.[5] It contains lesser-known photographs[4] of the group's history between 1968 (with the 2 June Movement) and 1977. The work was shown in an exhibition titled RAF: No Evidence / Kein Beweis in June 2018 at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. The critic Gerry Badger has written that "He is not attempting to reconstruct the history but play creatively, as it were, with this fascinating, but enigmatic material. . . . Messmer is questioning photography's role, both as witness, and ultimately, as art."[5] Messmer says "My work also has an ethical dimension: What images can be shown? How can they be shown? And why should we look at them?".[4]
