The photographer and political activist Miklós Klaus Rózsa (born 1954) was kept under surveillance for years by the Swiss Federal Office of Police, the Cantonal police, and the municipal police of Zurich. His photographs as well as the State Protection files compiled on him from 1971 – 1989 form the basis for the book. Christof Nu?ssli and Christoph Oeschger juxtapose the text produced by the state and the images produced by the monitored person. The collage of these sources produces new images that reveal the history of a politically agitated time in Switzerland. The two lines of narration could not be more antithetic: On the one hand are the images by Rózsa which document the events from the midst of the agitation, the Zurich youth movement of the 1980s. On the other hand the surveillance files demonstrate the distanced and often uncomprehending gaze of the police observing the occurrences. The montage brings the conflict between Rózsa’s images and the State Security texts to light. Observation and counter-observation clash. The book will be published in cooperation with cpress, Zurich.
