

Published on the occassion of an exhibition of works by the Bauhaus created between 1919 and 1928.

Dionysus in 69 was created by The Performance Group and played in the Group’s theater, The Performing Garage, from June 6, 1968 to July 27, 1969. The play text of Dionysus in 69 is based on group improvisation, composition by members of The Performance Group, and the William Arrowsmith translation of Euripides’ The Bacchae.

This book brings together a distinguished group of authros to reflect on Adjaye's practice as an architect.

This book presents a parade of millinery marvels – from the sweeping feather and lace confections of the Edwardians to the minimal pillboxes of the late seventies. These captivating high fashion photographs demonstrate the Vogue adage that nothing in nature or art is so magically transforming as a hat.

In the world of fashion, 'The well' is industry terminology for the main image section of a magazine. For influential British photographer Nigel Shafran, The Well is a space to critique and reflect the worlds of fashion from the inside, a place for unexpected creativity, subversive critique and wry commentary. This chronicles both Shafran’s commercial and non-commercial approach to photography, along with interviews and reflections between Shafran and his peers threaded throughout.

This book presents extended sequences of stills from each of Tarkovsky's films alongside synopses and cast and crew listings. It includes reflections on Tarkovsky’s work from fellow artists and writers.

Football explores the deep-rooted presence of the game across the Middle East and North Africa, where it transcends sport and becoming an integral part of the region’s daily life. The publication is motivated by a love of the game and a desire to showcase an underrepresented football culture in the MENA region. The book includes photographs taken between late 1980s up to 2023, in Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Oman, Yemen, UAE, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kurdistan, and other countries in the region.
The book features a variety of photographers including Abbas, Nikos Economopoulos, Karim Sahib, Jinane Ennasri, Marco Di Lauro, Alex Webb, and Salah Malkawi.
.jpg)
Tina Barney oeuvre contains a constructed critique of patrician otherness – from portraits in New England beach houses to New York apartments. This book collects portraits of the upper echelons of society, aristocrats and noblemen from Austria, Italy, England, France, Spain and Germany.

Norman Parkinson (1913-1990) has been described not only as a craftsman but also as a consummate artist who brought a dramatic glamour and bold inventiveness to the fashion portrait. Organised decade by decade and illustrated with fashion plates, portraits and contact sheets, the book features a number of previously unpublished editorial images.
.jpg)
Catalogue published on the occassion of the 2002 German museum exhibition "For the Benefit of All the Races of Mankind An Exhibition of Artifacts, Remnants, and Effluvia EXCAVATED from the Black Heart of a Negress" by African-American artist Kara Walker.

The Lithuanian filmmaker and chronicler of the American underground movement, Jonas Mekas, wrote down his dreams between August 1978 and June 1979. All these events and characters, combined with memories of his childhood in the Lithuanian fields and snow, are transformed and filtered through the absurd logic and advenutures of dreams.

Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as her "tribe". These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s.

Dieter Roth (1930–1998) was a highly diverse and influential artist, known for his work as a poet, sculptor, graphic designer, and musician. He associated with the Fluxus movement and explored the boundaries between material and intellect in his work, often using unconventional and even perishable items in his art. This book is characteristic of Roth's experimental approach to art and publishing, with a mix of letterpress texts, drawings, and rubber-stamp pictures, with German and English texts included.

Concentrating mainly on the 19th and 20th centuries, this is a study of the necklace as an emblem of wealth and status, shaped and reshaped throughout the centuries by successive fashions, techniques and materials, from the Egyptian broad collar to the diamond chokers of the 1920s.

A captivating look at the career of social and style revolutionary Vidal Sassoon. A visionary hairstylist who became a household name, Vidal Sassoon was an instrument of change during the cultural shifts of the 1960s.

Jonas Mekas in conversation film makers – including Andy Warhol, Nico Papatakis, Albert and David Maysles, Peter Kubelka, Agnes Varda, Harry Smith, John Cassavetes, Stan Brakhage.

This book offers design ideas for housing, inspired by the homes of various architects.

INTRA-VENUS is Hannah Wilke’s last work before she passed away 1993 of complications from Lymphoma. During the later stages of her illness, she collaborated with her husband, Donald Goddard, on a series of photographs documenting the realities of her physical and mental transformation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the artist Ed Ruscha created a series of small photo-conceptual artist's books, among them Twentysix Gas Stations, Various Small Fires, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Real Estate Opportunities, and A Few Palm Trees. This book collects ninety-one of these projects, showcasing the cover and sample layouts from each along with a description of the work. It also includes selections from Ruscha's books and an appendix listing all known Ruscha book tributes.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallises widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives.

Ed Ruscha is widely regarded as one of the world’s most important artists with a career spanning six decades from the early 1960s until the present day. His use of imagery and techniques seen in commerical art, such as advertising and his interest in popular culture and the everyday, connects him directly with pop art. This book thoroughly traces Ruscha's engagement with photography and reveals how his photographic works shed new light on his career as a whole.

The world's most talented photographers and prestigious models grace the pages of this classic volume that celebrates Yves Saint Laurent's illustrious career, reprinted in a smaller format on the eve of his fortieth anniversary. From pret-a-porter to haute couture, from the runway to the studio to the earth's most exotic settings, images from nearly fifty photographers, including Richard Avedon, Horst, Peter Lindbergh, Duane Michals, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Francesco Scavullo, Snowdon, and Bruce Weber bring YSL's renowned creations to glorious life.

GA Document is a Global Architecture focusing on contemporary international architecture and design projects.

A periodical book on modern houses from around the globe. Featuring work of architects Frank Lloyd Eight, Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudi, Pierre Chareau with Bernard Bijvoet, Michel de Klerk.
.jpg)
Over the course of 202-2021, during the pandemic, Kara Walker produced series of drawings in the style of a medieval 'Book of Hours'. Enigmatic images appear to traverse a range of time periods, from scenes of biblical and mythological origins, to images of historical violence, to others that suggest more recent political strife. The highly personal nature of these images capture Walker's own response to the intersection of past and present as a way to understand our contemporary political moment.
.jpg)
An exhibition catalogue of works from the Bauhaus housed at the Busch Reisinger Musuem Collection.

From fashion and food to literature and music, the Beats heralded a new way of living, and a new mode of recording their lives. There is hardly a part of American culture today that is untouched by their work. Fred and Gloria McDarrah lived and worked in the heart of the Beat scene. Astute observers and participants, they faithfully recorded what they saw in word and picture. Besides their own thoughts and images, they amassed a collection of authentic Beat writings, all in the author's own hand or typed by them. Now reproduced for the first time, these writings complement the photographs and memories in giving a full picture of what it was like to be a Beat. With over 240 photographs, this work promises to be a landmark document of the Beats, their lives, and times.

A collection of photographs documenting New York's Soho in the Eighties.

This book presents some of the most ingenious residential lofts in London, New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Paris, Chicago and Milan

A themed collection of Araki photographs. Issue 11: In Ruins

This is the first book to be published on the leading London architecture firm Gumuchdjian Architects whose widely published first project the Think Tank established their reputation for sensitive, contextual work.

A collection of photographs by David Hockney, published in 1982 for the exhibition of the same name at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

This book is a collection of portraits of women in France by Daniel Frasnay. Frasney, born in 1928 in Paris, was a French landscape and portrait photographer who belonged to the humanist movement.

A socialist journal of the social services. In this issue: the political economy of homelessness; housing in Milkwaukee for low income people; the mental health effects of work; fear in our culture.

Known and recognized for the elegance as much as for the insolence of her creations, Chantel Thomass imposed a style that has become, over time, synonymous with refinement and freedom for countless women. This book reveals all the richness and breadth of a partly ignored artistic universe.

This book aims to collect and present a comprehensive overview of the work of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. The book presents her typewritings series, all produced between the early 1970s (some of the earliest works are dated 1972) and 1989. Mail Art was her way to be in contact with the world outside the GDR, otherwise impossible to reach. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification, the artist stopped producing any art: she felt her involvement was no longer “needed”.

Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Davis’s paintings have deeply influenced the rise of figurative and representational painting in the twenty-first century. Davis’s emotionally charged work places him firmly in the canon of great American painting. Compiled through the unique relationship between Davis and Helen Molesworth, this monograph tells the story of a brilliant artist and cultural force through the eyes of his friends and collaborators.

GA Document is a Global Architecture focusing on contemporary international architecture and design projects.


Naïvy by Coco Capitán presents the artists paintings, large-scale photographs, and artist-embellished found objects, which expands upon the visual possibilities that open up to the artist through contemplation of an iconic form of apparel: the sailor suit.

A large poster of a photograph by Burkinabe photographer Sanlé Sory from 1972, which inspired Wales Bonner's Spring/Summer 2022 collection.
.jpg)
Beginning with his early days in London's East End, this book follows the life and work of David Bailey from the 1950s up until the late 1960 – from his first photographic experiences as an assistant to John French; his early years with Vogue; his close relationship with the stars of rock music; and his friendships and love affairs.

The eighth volume of the Villages and Towns series explores vernacular architecture across the Iberian Peninsula. With texts by Fernando Higueras Díaz and photographs by Yukio Futagawa, it examines landscape, climate, community harmony, environmental preservation, and natural light, highlighting shared regional principles that create enduring architectural diversity.

Photographs of young people across different cities – punks, ravers, squatters and various tribes of youth.

Control: The Ian Curtis Film biopic is Anton Corbijn's is one of the directors most famous projects that followed the troubled life of post-punk Joy Division lead musician Ian Curtis. This book is a document of the process of making the film – a visual diary with annotations, drawings, and a wealth of photographs detailing the creative process from pre-production to first screenings.

Jocks and Nerds: Men's Style in the Twentieth Century offers a visual history of the way men have dressed in the twentieth century, tracing twelve social roles that have formed fashion and fashion leaders.

Ibrahima Sory Sanle (b. 1943) started his photographic career in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1960, the year his country (now Burkina Faso) gained independence from France. Sanle opened his Volta Photo portrait studio in 1965 and, working with his Rolleiflex twin lens medium format camera, Volta Photo was soon recognised as the finest studio in the city. This book is dedicated to Volta Photo’s heyday in the 1960’s and 1970’s, telling the story of photographer Sanlé Sory’s fascinating and moving studio images.

With over 200 images of t-shirt 'messages', A Typology of T-shirts looks at those individuals who stand out in a crowd through their choice of the message on their back.

A limited edition booklet published in conjunction with the 2009 Tate Triennial. It functions as a companion guide, featuring contributions that explore the "Altermodern" concept—a term coined by curator Nicolas Bourriaud to describe art made as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.

Where is ‘69” Shinjuku Kaminari Zoku has taken on cult status in Japan and is almost impossible to find. The book contains numerous gritty black and white photographs documenting the Japanese biker gangs of Shinjuku in the late sixties. Fukuda has done an incredible job of capturing the life style surrounding this slice of pop history

Crucifixion on Caulaincourt is a series of black and white diaristic images by Kingsley Ifill.
.jpg)
This book presents the work of British artist Bruce McLean, known for his work across disciplines from sculpture, performance art to painting and ceramics, to books and film.

Photographs of fugitive and performance artist CS Leigh.

Paintings by Harley Weir presents images made as a form of digression from her traditional photographic practice. Presented as short, rhythmical sequences, Paintings moves across the page like a melody, linking rhythm, colour and form through surface studies made consistently throughout the last three years.

Portraits taken of visitors to Amsterdam's Paradiso club in the early 80s.

In the Name of God highlights Western misconceptions around Islam and showcasing the faith’s peaceful nature. Set against the backdrop of rising Islamophobia in France, it underscores the importance of accurate representation. The book celebrates the cultural and religious life of the Muslim diaspora in France, highlighting their resilience and devotion through photography. It portrays daily expressions of faith, communal practices, and the integrated blend of tradition and modernity, aiming to reshape perceptions and celebrate the beauty of Islam and its ummah.

A collection of black and white images by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy documenting life in 1940s Eton.

Catalogue issued on the occasion of the 1973 Italian visual and concrete poetry exhibition held at the Finch College Museum in New York, U.S.A., and at the Civic Gallery in Turin, Italy.

Throughout the 1980s, Arakawa continued to address both the physical and conceptual relationship of the viewer to a painting. This publication is the catalogue for thw 1991 retrospective, Constructing the Perceiver – Arakawa: Experimental Works, which opened at the National Museum of Art in Tokyo and later travelled to The National Museum of Art, Kyoto and The Matsuzukaya Art Museum, Nagoya.

Günther Uecker (1930–2025) was a renowned German painter, sculptor, and installation artist, famous for his pioneering kinetic art and iconic, tactile nail reliefs. As a key member of the post-war ZERO group, he explored light, space, and movement, using rhythmic, repetitive hammering to create dynamic, meditative structures that interact with the viewer. This book is a collection fo some of his nail paintings and watercolours.

Pharmakon brings together a sequence of subtle and disquieting photographs with a dozen compact short stories by Teju Cole.

This book is Hiller's response to Sigmund Freud's personal art collection, library and famous couch. Inside, it presents a series of archaeological collection boxes, and through turning the pages the reader embarks on a personal journey to disclose the secrets of each box.

The complex and often ambiguous relationship between the hand crafted and the machine made is examined in this intriguing look at the ever-changing world of fashion and taste. Manus x Machina traces styles of dress from one-of-a-kind works and haute couture created by highly skilled artisans, through the introduction of industrial manufacturing, to extraordinary recent technological advancements applied to high fashion, such as 3D printing, laser cutting, and computer-generated weaving and patterns.

The 408-page collection of Grace Coddington's greatest work as a fashion stylist and sittings editor is not just a monograph of her first 30 years at Vogue, it is also a visual reminiscence of 30 years of British and American Vogue's best work. The photographers whose work is included: Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Norman Parkinson, Ellen von Unwerth, Bruce Weber, Mario Testino, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Annie Leibovitz, Sarah Moon, Peter Lindbergh, and more.

A collection of photographs and essays exploring the nude body from Jain Kelly Bravo, Manuel Alvarez, Harry Callaghan, Lucien Clergue, Ralph Gibson, Kenneth Josephson, Andre Kertesz, Duane Michals and Helmut Newton.

Issue on interior design in America.

Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused subculture of skateboarding as it came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s, Ed Templeton's Wires Crossed pulses with the raw, combustive energy of Templeton's image-making from the last twenty-plus years.

Including over 200 of Vinca Petersen’s photographs, diary entries and ephemera, No System is a party book that one can also read like an alternative family album. This publication tells the story of a 10-year journey around Europe in the 1990’s that Petersen did in a van, following illegal free parties and techno festivals. Images of rave parties, the road and intimate portraits of friends and strangers compose the series. If nostalgia for this free-spirited bygone era and this alternative lifestyle certainly arise in the book, one can also read it as a necessary manifesto for our current times under surveillance.

This zine, published to coincide with the exhibition of the same name, brings together a selection of mail art projects that Carrión developed between 1973 and 1983, erasing the boundaries between artwork, archive and document.

A periodical book on modern houses from around the globe. Featuring work of architects Le Corbusier, Atelier 5, Taller de Arquitectura, Carlo Aymonino/Aldo Rossi, Ralph Erskine.


A photographic survey of Metropolitan architecture by David Adjaye

This book is a pictorial survey presenting seven decades of women's footwear as illustrated in Vogue.

A comprehensive history of furniture design including works by Michael Thonet, Otto Wagner, Alvar Aalto, Victor Horta, Henry van de Velde, Peter Behrens, Marcel Breuer, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinin, Hans Wegner, Joe Colombo, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Josef Hoffmann, George Nelson

This book presents Gillian Wearing's most seminial public artwork in which she invited members of the public to write what was on their mind on a sign. With their permission, she then photographed them holding their written statement. 'Queer and Happy', 'I'm Desperate', 'I Really Love Regents Park', 'Convenience causes apathy', are just a few of the responses. The images presented interrupt the logic of documentary photography, and present an engineering of self representation.

Photographs tracing the evolution of the T Shirt.

A document of Los Angeles told in photographs and prose.

Issue on the Pompidou Centre, Paris 1972-1977

New York photographer Tina Barney was born to an upper-class East Coast family. Ever since she started to take photographs in 1974 she has documented and examined her family's life. As an intimate observer, the viewer witnesses the intricacies of social rituals-weddings, Christmas dinners, and cocktail parties. Barney captures the tension between the polished surfaces and the intensity of the feelings underneath.

While Haring's career involved a diverse range of art making—painting, drawing, performance, video, murals, and art merchandising, he drew over 5,000 chalk drawings over a 5 year period, from 1980 to 1985, in New York City subway stations. These have become his most well known and celebrated works, and this book present them together.

GA Document is a Global Architecture focusing on contemporary international architecture and design projects.

This book takes place at the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries, in the pre and post-September 11th world. It is a singular product of its time, packed full of words and images portraying the architectural projects and metaphysical mechanics that have defined Rem Koolhas's OMA-AMO firm.
An homage to women on the range.

Aisha is Yemeni Egyptian American photographer and filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashi’s first artist’s book. This powerful, delicate publication, inspired by Al-Arashi’s great-grandmother, Aisha, is an homage to the lineage of women that she descends from; women of the multidimensional and many-layered landscapes of the MENA region.

Ancient and Modern is a collection of photographs chosen from Eggleston's earliest photographs taken in the American South, Africa and England. The photographs depict subjects and objects from everyday life and it is Eggleston's unique ability to find beauty, and striking displays of colour, in ordinary scenes that make him one of the greats.

In this anthology, curator and director Catherine de Zegher compiles 25 influential essays on women artists from the numerous books she has written and edited throughout her career. Like many of de Zegher’s previous projects and books, Women’s Work Is Never Done promotes the feminine principle, showcasing the work of female artists from across the world. Featured artists include Martha Rossler, Anna Maria Maiolino, Anna Atkins, Hilma af Klint, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Judith Wright, Simryn Gill and more.
.jpg)
VILE magazine was published between 1974 and 1983 by the mail artists Anna Banana and Bill Gaglione. The inside contents of VILE featured a wide array of texts & manifestoes, letters, performance documentation, articles on individual artists & their projects, detourned mass media advertisements as well as art works from mail artists in different countries.

This book presents two decades of Beverly Pepper's bold sculptural statements – from the highly polished stainless-steel works of the 1960s to the earthbound geometrics of the 1970s to the more recent monoliths.

Echoes: A Vision of the American Southwest captures the vision of a French photographer Jean Meziere experiencing colour and light in the boundless expanse of the Amercian Southwest.

This book explores overlooked yet vibrant history of Black participation in American film, from the beginning of cinema through the civil rights movement.

This book is a comprehensive guide to skateboarding – including information on history, safety, maintenance, instructions and glossary terms.

This updated edition brings back to life an era of Paris' history, seen through Nabokov’s original Polaroid photos, together with the original introduction by the late interior designer Andrée Putman.

GA Document is a Global Architecture focusing on contemporary international architecture and design projects.

Born in Iran and currently living in the US, Shirin Neshat's work sits at the centre of two very different cultural universes. This book documents all of her activity, including her first black and white photographic work in which she gave voices to Iranian women by tracing onto their faces, hands, and naked feet the verses of ancient Persian poets.

In this incredible book, photographer Andrew Bush examines the tension between private and public in his remarkable series of photographs of individuals driving cars in and around Los Angeles--a city famous for its car culture. By attaching a camera to the passenger side window, Bush made these pictures while driving alongside his subjects--often traveling at 60 mph.

A collection of rarely seen photographs that provide an entirely fresh perspective on male friendship in the 19th century. The poignant images in more than 100 early photographs, drawn from both public and private collections, suggest a surprisingly broad-minded attitude towards physical intimacy between men, challenging the conventional view of the Victorian era.

Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was an influential American artist known as the "father of mail art" and a key figure in early Pop Art and Neo-Dada. He founded the New York Correspondence School, sending collages and letters through the mail to friends and acquaintances. Known as "New York's most famous unknown artist," he specialized in, surreal, text-heavy collages.

Satellites is the culmination of a seven-year photographic journey that takes viewers through the countries and enclaves once held in orbit by the immense gravity of Moscow, the nucleus of the Soviet empire. The photographs reveal the often grim circumstances in these half-forgotten regions, uniformly poor and often politically unstable.

Shapeshifting is a contemplation and reflection of the experience of dance. Molly through fragmented poetry and prose, Evan through photography. Dancing with his camera, he surrendered his body to the moment – becoming it, rather than observing it. In this way, the camera became an extension of his subconscious. The resulting long exposure photographs become visual abstractions of dance as a feeling.
The Library
Our Library is the heart of Reference Point and from where all other elements take their philosophy and context. An evolving and growing collection of rare books, ephemera and printed matter focused on Post-War Radical Art, Architecture, Design, Fashion and Culture. The library exists to create inspiration and conversation, and provide creatives of all stages and disciplines reference points for their projects.
Our librarians are always on hand to serve as research assistants but you can also email us with your interests and project brief and we can prepare a selection of works in advance of your visit.
Reference Point
2 Arundel Street
WC2R 3DA, London