Background information
2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the student protests. "Arwed MESSMER has been working for ten years with second-hand photographic image documents from public archives, which are the visual basis of his artistic work. In the Berlin Police History Collection, he researched image convolutions that the police made during the student unrest of the 1960s as part of their usual self-documentation. These images, largely unpublished until now, show a different view of the historical events than the press images that dominate our visual memory to this day.
Content
This b/w photo volume, 'Berlin 1966-70' by Arwed MESSMER, shows the student protests of 1968 from the perspective of the Berlin police. For this he digitized over 1000 B&W negatives and edited them in a film-like sequential narrative structure that breaks down the boundaries between photography and film." (© Hartmann Projects, 2018)