Published in. Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance, Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas (eds), University of Sydney Press, 2015 1 Interventions in seeing: surveillance, camouflage & the Cold War camera Donna West Brett The Wall, we might conclude, stands not on the outside of the GDR society, but right in its center, and is invisible. It is present, it is felt, but nobody dares describe what they see. They see walls everywhere, but the Wall is not seen. (Koepke, 1996, 85) Ways not to be seen In his Denkbild titled ‘Ways not to be seen’ the German philosopher Ernst Bloch ruminates on a phenomena that he refers to as ‘unseeing’. As an example of how unseeing can take an object below the horizon of perception he recounts a story of the Prussians in Paris in 1871 in search of the Mona Lisa painting, which was hidden behind a wall in the Hotel des Invalides by a canny protector. As the spiked helmets burst into the junk room concealing the painting, the soldiers instead found a rare map that satisfied their objective, whereas a few steps away, the Mona Lisa remained hidden with her face to the wall, unseen. Bloch considers this strategy of making something unseeable as diverting the covetous gaze from the main objective by satisfying it with something less; the gaze is shrewdly satiated before it finds it target. (Bloch 2006, 82–3) This concept of unseeing resonates with various strategies of camouflage such as visual deception, concealment, blending or the psychological effect of hiding things in full view. The concept also informs my reading of surveillance photography of the Cold War and the role of the Berlin Wall in defining the scopic realm of the GDR. The following analysis accounts for the photographic restrictions in East Germany that contributed to an underground of socialist photographers and a heightened state observation culture, resulting in an explosion of surveillance tactics that employed extreme camouflage techniques to ensure their success. 1 (Wedler 1962, 100–2) I explore this tendency toward camouflage and surveillance through the work of German contemporary photographer Arwed Messmer who employs the unseen archives of the GDR and the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to comment on the secrecy of this regime. Messmer’s photographic engagement with images from these archives explores issues of propaganda and concealment in relation to the erection of the Berlin Wall, attempted border breaks and their associated crime-scenes, and brings into view heinous actions of surveillance activities against German citizens. Combined with the relatively unchartered limits on seeing in Germany, both in the national socialist period and the Cold War, the photographic archival projects discussed here take on new meaning and can be read as engaging with a specific photographic seeing, which is to look at looking itself. The analysis of these ‘unseen’ photographs of 1 Photography of public places was severely limited from 1961–1989. A list of restrictions was published in Die Fotografie in 1962.