Arwed Messmer – Clearing the Depths

Following on from a number of projects that have drawn on various archive collections of functional photography (police, military, and urban planning archives), Arwed Messmer here turns to his own personal photographic archive. He looks back at the massive upheavals in East Germany and Berlin after the reunification of Germany in 1990. For this project, Messmer uses hitherto unpublished pictures and re-edits existing groups of works, creating new arrangements and new relationships between the different series. Problematic aspects of recent German history are exposed, highlighting the return of nationalist thinking in a reunited Germany. There are also views of the reconstruction of Berlin, with the first images showing the demolition of East Germany’s post-war modernist heritage.

163 pages, 21.5 x 33.5 cm, thread-bound hardcover, Spector Books (Leipzig).