Recent results from ELSA

One of the foremost challenges in hadron physics is to obtain an understanding of the structure of baryons. The main features of the baryon mass spectrum at low excitation energies are reasonably known and described quite accurately by models, but the high-mass spectrum is still rather obscure. With modern achievements in accelerators, highly polarized nucleon targets and hermetically closed detectors allowing for charged and neutral particle detection high-lying excitations can be investigated through the systematic study of single and multiple meson production. In this contribution the instrumentation and results of experiments from the ELSA accelerator at Bonn as well as their significance for baryon resonance analyses are described. In particular, data on photoproduction of vector and pseudoscalar mesons of different flavors are presented.