Arwed Messmer’s Berlin 1966 – 1970 approaches its subject from a direction opposite to the one most viewers expect. Where the student protests of the late 1960s survive in collective memory largely through press photographs, this book draws on a different archive: images the Berlin police made of those events as part of their own routine documentation. Messmer, who over the past decade has built his artistic work from photographic documents held in public archives, examined the police historical collection in Berlin and made his selection from its holdings. More than a thousand black-and-white negatives, digitized and published here for the first time, form the visual substance of the project.
The result is not a conventional picture book. Its scale gives some indication: 796 pages and roughly 450 illustrations at 19.4 × 21.5 cm. Yet the more consequential fact is structural. Messmer orders the material as a sequential narrative, one that presses against the border between photography and film. A single frame can be read as an incident; read in sequence, it becomes something closer to a record of unfolding time, in which the actions of police officers and demonstrators are registered frame by frame rather than frozen into an emblem. The viewpoint is administrative, often oblique, and it rarely coincides with the decisive moment that press images were expected to supply.
The stakes of the volume are historical as much as visual. In presenting the police’s own documentation, the book makes available a second register of evidence against which the widely circulated iconography of 1968 in Berlin might be tested. Essays by Florian Ebner, Annett Gröschner, Uta Grundman and Messmer accompany the photographs, and Carsten Eisfeld’s design at Eberle&Eisfeld shapes the sequence and pace of the material. Published by Hartmann Books in 2018, the hardcover includes a foil stamp and a tipped-in booklet, with texts in German and English.
For readers engaged with archival and conceptual photography — and with the question of how state records can be reworked into art — this volume deserves serious consideration less for its rarity than for its method. It shows how a documentary corpus assembled for institutional purposes can be re-edited into a form with its own narrative and its own historical argument, drawn from images that were never intended to enter public memory.
