STOP - Paperback – Signed by the artist

Published by: MUSEUMS etc, 2026

164 Pages, monochrome images, 21 × 1.5 × 14cm

‘Peter Kennard’s STOP is an extraordinary and urgent artist’s book, distilling a lifetime of revolutionary image-making into a compelling and poetic visual narrative. Contemporary images of war frequently oscillate between graphic images of death and destruction that repel the viewer in shock and distress on the one hand, and moving image footage more akin to video games that abstract or glorify deadly attacks on the other. By contrast, Kennard’s unsettling multi-layered and monochrome images, merge and overlay different conflicts which are then scratched, drawn over, stencilled and blotted. They underscore the devastating and endless cycle of wars, at different times and in different places, unified by their chilling effects. STOP implicates us as active witnesses in this unbroken cycle of violence and its “shattered fragments.’ --Gilane Tawadros, Director, Whitechapel Galley, London

‘For half a century, Peter Kennard has been Britain’s artistic conscience. Where others stay silent, he shouts. Where others placate, he protests. Our art would be so much poorer without him’. --Waldemar Januzczak

‘Peter Kennard's art became a political weapon from 1968 onwards. He became the John Heartfield  of our generation and his pens and paintbrushes are still firing’. --Tariq Ali

‘At once raw witness and stark rebuke, Peter Kennard’s STOP eschews any simplistic narrative. Terror, barbarity and malign control is manifest through a glass darkly, a tactic that demands we pay closer attention lest we forget that man’s propensity for violence is rife. STOP is an insistent, essential and ever timely call for global peace and justice’. --Adrian Burnham - Flying Leaps

‘Peter Kennard’s images communicate a vital message of resistance against violence and war. These previously unseen, early images in STOP mark the beginning of his iconic art of photomontage which spans cultural, political and geographic divides with an enduring urgency’. --Ben Harman, Senior Curator of Photography, National Galleries of Scotland

‘Before us all there was Peter Kennard , this book like all his work is timeless. He is Britain’s greatest war artist’. --Jeremy Deller

‘Ideally these words would be as powerful as Peter Kennard's images and get you to buy his book. OR: Ideally this book would slap you in the face and wake you up’. --Laura Prouvost

Text from book by Peter Kennard

This is an entirely visual book, but my aim is for the reader to read the images as though it consisted of words, ie a visual narrative. Through the use of high contrast imagery with added blots, scratches, drawings,  stencilled computer punch cards etc I break down the photographic images into the least representational marks that still designate a human presence in struggle. I’m attempting to create a visual language beyond realism so that the reader actively engages in decoding images that don’t reveal themselves immediately. When going through the book the reader can then become active in their own relationship to the struggles depicted, rather than passive viewers. STOP acts as a Rorschach test of reality. Walter Benjamin talked of ‘blasting open the continuum of history’, I want to picture the shattered fragments of that continuum.

@earth - Hardcover – Signed by the artist

Published by: Tate publishing, 2011

192 Pages, Colour, 17.5 × 2 × 12.5cm

'This book perfectly captures the brutal asymmetries of our age: heavy weaponry trained on broken people, all-seeing technologies and disappearing identities, perpetually exhaling industry and an asphyxiating planet. If there's a word that's worth a thousand pictures, it's @earth'. --Naomi Klein

'I take my hat off to you Sir, @earth looks great'. --Banksy

‘Kennard never lets up – how could he (how could you?) when there is so much horror and injustice. Few artists have done so much with the unique virtue of montage… art cannot change the world but while Kennard is still working, there is at least hope’. -- Laura Cumming, The Observer

‘Peter Kennard has been producing his politically radical photomontages for 50 years. We need people who carry on fighting the good fight. People who keep their focus despite the changing cultural and political landscape. The message is consistent – the message is clear – the message is true. The message is uncompromising, brutal and hard-hitting – but also very beautiful, it’s beautiful because it wants to keep us alive. It’s a jolt of electricity. A shot in the arm. A kick up the backside. You know what? It’s a wake-up call’. -- Jarvis Cocker

'Peter Kennard's work is haunting. Eschewing words, it insists upon not being forgotten. He is a master of the medium of photomontage. His images are impossible to convey with words because of their unmistakable visual texture, pure and dirty, suggesting a strange amalgam of X-ray, satellite image and slag. The future - which for so long was a mine of gory rhetoric for those holding power - today depends upon those who insist upon looking beyond their lifetime. And to do this we have to scrutinise, like Peter Kennard, our nightmares and suppressed hopes. His art cannot be ignored’. -- John Berger

Books dispatched in signed hand painted paper bag from book launch.

UK: £58 incl P&P. Overseas: please email peter@peterkennard.com with country name for P&P costs.