Miklós Klaus Rózsa

Miklós Klaus Rózsa was kept under surveillance for nearly two decades by the Swiss Federal Office of Police, the cantonal police, and the Zurich municipal police, who compiled a State Protection file on him between 1971 and 1989. This book, conceived and designed by Christof Nüssli and Christoph Oeschger, juxtaposes Rózsa's own photographs, taken from within the Zurich youth movement he documented and took part in, against the bureaucratic language and images of the police files that tracked him. The collage that results sets the immediacy of a participant's images against the flat, often uncomprehending distance of institutional observation, producing a document of a politically volatile period in Swiss history built entirely from the friction between watcher and watched. Published in cooperation with cpress, Zurich, the 624-page book includes roughly 400 black-and-white illustrations and text by Nüssli, Oeschger, historian Peter Kamber, and Rózsa himself, bound as a thread-sewn, lay-flat brochure with flaps.