Julian Röder is a photographer in the truest sense. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Röder, who was born in East Germany in 1981, worked as a photojournalist with Germany’s influential photography agency Ostkreuz for several years. Now free of his journalistic obligations, but shaped by his experiences in the field, Roder has developed a conceptual-documentary approach that is profoundly unique.

He creates series of photographs that negotiate structures of power, environment and economy far beyond that which is concretely shown in the images. His first major body of work was the long-term documentation project The Summits, depicting protests at the edges of the security zones of state summits all around the world.

In 2011, Röder traveled to Abu Dhabi to visit the largest arms fair in the middle east, which formed the basis of his series World of Warfare—an alarming insight into the commercial and social spectacle that propogates warfare. The photographs do not merely depict the events he is photographing, but offer insight into the societies we are part of, and the governing powers at play.