In December 2015, MACK published *Spirit is a Bone*, a 240-page hardback by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The faces inside were not photographed in any ordinary sense. They were generated by a four-lens facial-recognition camera developed in Moscow for public security and border control — a device engineered to produce a full frontal image of a person without that person’s cooperation.

Because the lenses operate in tandem, anyone standing before them is made passive: whichever way the sitter looks, the face is turned forward, stripped of shadow, make-up, disguise and composure. What results resembles a digital life mask more than a photograph — a three-dimensional facsimile, rotatable and closely scrutinised, low in resolution and often fragmented. Its success is measured by a narrow technical question: how precisely the machine can match nose, eyes and chin.

Among those depicted are many Moscow citizens and Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevic. From these yields the artists assemble a taxonomy of contemporary Russia, casting portraits by profession — a deliberate echo of August Sander’s *Citizens of the Twentieth Century*, but made with little if any human interaction.

The images remain, stubbornly, portraits of individuals negotiating a civil contract with state power and frequently failing to. An apparatus built to render faces legible becomes, in sequence, a study of what refuses to be read.

The book emerged from encounters and conversations between Broomberg and Chanarin and the photography collections at the Library of Birmingham, through a commission from GRAIN and the Library with support from Arts Council England. For a collector, its interest lies at the meeting point of conceptual portraiture and the politics of imaging: a portrait series produced by surveillance technology turned back on itself, issued as a hardback with tipped-in images.