Podmoskovye

Podmoskovye gathers still images pulled from surveillance-camera footage of Moscow's suburbs, printed full-bleed and offered without captions or explanation.

Pascal Anders built the book around an epigraph from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, using its account of disciplinary power to frame eighty-four images that give the viewer nothing to interpret them by beyond the fact of having been recorded by a camera never meant to produce pictures for anyone. Self-published in Paris in 2015 as a 144-page softcover in an edition of 100, the book was distributed free to anyone who requested a copy, a gesture Anders described as restitution for images that surveillance cameras take from people without their knowledge every day.

Anders is a French photographer whose later self-published books, including CCTV (2016) and Common Street Views (2019), return repeatedly to surveillance footage and appropriated street imagery as material.