Miklós Klaus Rózsa

The photographer and political activist Miklós Klaus Rózsa (*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 Nüssli 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.

Author: Christof Nüssli, Christoph Oeschger
Publisher: Spector Books & cpress
Language: German-English
Pages: 600
Binding: Softcover
€42.00

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The Moiré Effect. Lytle Shaw. Cabinet Books / Bookhorse.

Ernst Moiré was a mysterious Swiss photographer whose career has been obscured by silence, documentary voids, and misinformation. So much of his life is shrouded in speculation and half-truths that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure who will forever be remembered as the inadvertent inventor of the blur that bears his name. In 2002, Cabinet magazine dispatched literary scholar and detective Lytle Shaw to Zurich to investigate the reclusive figure‘s life and work. Shaw published his initial findings in Cabinet issue 7, but the puzzle of Moiré continued to vex him, and it is only now, a decade later, that the full story of his continuing investigation can finally be told. The Moiré Effect tracks the artist from his humble Alpine beginnings as the son of a postal clerk to his fateful founding of a Zurich photography studio in the 1890s and his subsequent role in the lives of a number of curious figures including the legendary Dutch architect Mer Awsümbildungs, the theosophist philosopher Rudolph Steiner, and several members of the old and fearsomely secretive Chadwick family. Hailed by Harry Mathews as a „complex“ and „excitingly“ written book bound to „delight“ and „entertain,“ Shaw‘s thriller takes readers on a journey through the elegant salons of Swiss palazzi and the dusty bowels of ancient archives, finally ascending to a mountainous conclusion as hair-raising as it is bedevilingly oblique.

Lytle Shaw is a New York based writer whose books include Cable Factory 20, The Lobe, Principles of the Emeryville Shellmound, and Frank O‘Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. His art writing has appeared in Cabinet, Artforum, and Parkett and in catalogues for Dia Art Foundation, the Drawing Center and the Reina Sofía. With Jimbo Blachly, Shaw oversees the Chadwick family archive, which has been exhibited widely and is represented by Winkleman Gallery in New York.

128 Pages, 11 x 18 cm
Paperback
First Edition, 2012
Edited by Lex Trüb, Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi
ISBN 978-3-9523391-3-8

D 9 €

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Rollo Press™ is pleased to announce the release of it’s first artist edition, Zürich Ruins My Nerves by Hamburg based Stefan Marx. The piece is a reinterpretation of a watercolour drawing Stefan did a few years back when his computer died during a stay in Zürich.