Disrupting Archives: Stasi Surveilliance & its Photographic Afterlife

In its heyday from the 1960s to 1980s, the Ministry of State Security for the German Democratic Republic, commonly known as the Stasi, executed a mass-surveillance machine that recorded the everyday activities of its citizens and foreign interests. In producing one of the world’s largest archives of surveillance records the Stasi’s photographic practice and its instrumental mechanisms remain a significant testament to the intrusive observations of life in the GDR. Through key studies from its archive of two million photographs, Disrupting Archives provides new insights into Stasi surveillance practice, its photographic impetus, subjects, aesthetics, and materiality. The book examines largely unpublished photographic records of surveillance operations and its mechanisms, including sustained analysis of previously unrecovered surveillance activities, and key examples of escape attempts from the GDR. The analysis, thereby, unveils the inherent silences of the archive.

In foregrounding the archive’s material and residual effects, the book expands our understanding of Stasi surveillance practices through close analysis of photographic methods and mechanisms such as material and chemical damage, the destruction of files, and archival traces. This is complemented by key examples of the archive’s afterlife in the work of contemporary German photographers whose reframing of the archive offers a reparative approach to the Stasi’s unsettling visual legacy. Against the grain of seeing the archive as historically contained, the book instead offers a timely critique of its relevance to our surveillance-saturated world.

IMAGE: BStU Berlin