Arwed Messmer: Reenactment MfS

In the archives of East Germany’s Ministry for State Security — the Stasi — lie countless photographs of failed attempts to cross the Berlin Wall. Arwed Messmer’s Reenactment MfS takes a selection of these pictures as its starting point and places them alongside further images of official evidence held by the archives of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records. The subject is not escape as anecdote but the photographic apparatus that recorded it: who photographed, for what file, and with what assumptions about proof.

What emerges is less a documentary album than a collage. Found images, retouched and recontextualized, are brought together with photographs Messmer made himself, so that anonymous institutional records and authored work sit in the same visual field. The photo critic Gerry Badger characterized this working method as “an artistic reevaluation of history.” The joining is the argument: the pictures are handled as material to be weighed and rearranged, not as transparent windows onto an event.

Florian Ebner’s phrase for Messmer’s stance, “documentary empathy,” points to the same tension. The book presses on the authenticity of the documentary image, which, in the publisher’s account, is never entirely free of “enactment.” Published in 2014, twenty-five years after the Wall fell, it returns to a central theme of recent German history with an approach that asks how photography itself has been used to frame that history.

The volume is published by Hatje Cantz: 256 pages, 148 photographs, hardcover with a 32-page booklet, 180 by 250 millimeters, in German and English, designed by Carsten Eisfeld. For a collection built around archival appropriation and the questioning of photographic evidence, this is a focused, deliberate example — a photographer working directly on state records, with the collision of official image and authorial intervention left visible rather than smoothed away.

In the archives of East Germany’s Stasi secret police, officially named the Ministry for State Security, there are countless photographs of failed escape attempts at the Berlin Wall. In this visual collage, Arwed Mess­mer (* 1964) presents a selection of these photos and further images of official evidence from the holdings of The Agency of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives. The result is an arresting, complex col­lage of found, retouched, and recontextualized visual records and Messmer’s own photographs—a working method described by photo critic Gerry Badger as “an artistic reevaluation of history.” Twenty-five years af­ter the fall of the Wall, Reenactment MfS takes a new look at a major theme in recent German history, with an alternative approach to understanding contempo­rary history and to the use of photography. With what Florian Ebner describes as “documentary empathy,” Arwed Messmer challenges the authenticity of the documentary image, which is never completely free of “enactment.”

Designed by: Carsten Eisfeld
German, English
October 2014, 256 Pages , 148 Photos
hardcover, with 32 page booklet
180mm x 250mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3911-5

Publisher page editorial text:
| An unusual body of evidence, an artistic perspective on the legacy of East Germany’s secret police
In the archives of East Germany’s Stasi secret police, officially named the Ministry for State Security, there are countless photographs of failed escape attempts at the Berlin Wall. In this visual collage, Arwed Mess­mer (* 1964) presents a selection of these photos and further images of official evidence from the holdings of The Agency of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives. The result is an arresting, complex col­lage of found, retouched, and recontextualized visual records and Messmer’s own photographs—a working method described by photo critic Gerry Badger as “an artistic reevaluation of history.” Twenty-five years af­ter the fall of the Wall, Reenactment MfS takes a new look at a major theme in recent German history, with an alternative approach to understanding contempo­rary history and to the use of photography. With what Florian Ebner describes as “documentary empathy,” Arwed Messmer challenges the authenticity of the documentary image, which is never completely free of “enactment.”

Publisher source ↗