This is a book about a totalitarian system that uses the camera for its own purposes. It includes reflections on the mechanism and the relationships connected with looking and being looked at, observing and being observed, describing and being described. Violence begins in the nervous system, from an impulse that runs through the body and makes someone press the shutter. It ends in an archive, the place where information and pictures are stored. This basis reveals who interprets the collected data, and consequently who controls the facts.

The book also tells a story of spies, agents, guards, algorithm programmers, surveillance subjects, suspects, archivists, convicts and accidentally captured passers-by. They interact on various levels, all comprising one huge machine, inordinate and dispersed. All the material comes from the archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, which investigates the history of Poland between the early twentieth century and the fall of the totalitarian system, and the volume contains descriptions based on archival notes together with an essay by the historian and archivist Tomasz Stempowski.