Withheld due to:
Christof Nüssli's Withheld due to: (cpress, Zurich, 2016) is a photobook made from 198 redacted photographs the United States Department of Defense released about Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror. It asks whether a censored document can still make anything transparent.
The pictures were released after requests from the American Civil Liberties Union. Nüssli reproduces them in the order they appear in the original 162-page file, with excerpts from the surrounding government records. Faces and identifying details are blacked out, and what survives is often an isolated part of a body. A text by Nüssli and a text by Eliza Relman accompany the images. The 404-page softcover was issued in an edition of 500, each copy sealed in a zip-lock bag with a handwritten label. It was chosen among the Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2016.
Nüssli (b. 1986, Zurich) works with video, installation, text and print, and his subjects are state power, repression and the archiving of information. He co-founded cpress with Christoph Oeschger in 2014. Their first book, Miklós Klaus Rózsa (cpress and Spector Books, 2014), set an activist photographer's pictures against the police files kept on him. The Abu Ghraib material returned in Nüssli's 2017 installation A: No.///End of Statement/// at Helmhaus Zurich.