Arwed Messmer – Berlin, Fruchtstrasse

On 27 March 1952 Berlin’s municipal authorities commissioned Fritz Tiedemann to take photographs of the section of Fruchtstraße between Ostbahnhof station and Stalinallee. His images document views of the façades on the street seven years after the end of World War II and two decades before the buildings were demolished. The plan to destroy them was already in place when Tiedemann produced his pictures. Arwed Messmer and Annett Gröschner used these images as the source material for a fascinating photographic and literary project. As in previous joint projects, photographer Messmer and writer Gröschner explore aspects of the documentary in photography. Messmer digitally joins together Tiedemann’s thirty-two individual negatives to produce a single panorama portrait of Fruchtstraße and its people, a portrait that is also found in archive documents and research on the street’s history and is taken up by Annett Gröschner in her text Great Beetroot Today.

142 pages, 24 x 30cm, hardcover, Spector Books (Leipzig).