German, b. 1964; lives and works in Berlin
Arwed Messmer was born in 1964 in West Germany. He has worked as a documentary urban photographer since the beginning of the 1990s, during which time he has devoted his work to documenting the changing face of Berlin. Since 2006, he has focused on image collections in archives, dealing with photographs that have lost their original documentary function. These investigations have given rise to extensive exhibitions and publications on East Berlin of the 1950s, the early years of the Berlin Wall, and the Stasi archives (with some of the projects carried out in collaboration with author Annett Gröschner). In 2014 he received a grant for Contemporary German Photography from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung for the project RAF – No Evidence, which was also nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2018.
