In 1968, amid the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in London and the global upheavals that followed, Peter Kennard turned from painting to photomontage in search of a more direct political language. STOP emerged from that moment.Working with images drawn from newspapers and magazines — civil rights marchers, bombed landscapes, military parades, protest crowds — Kennard re-photographed, layered, scratched and overlaid them with autographic marks. The result is neither documentary nor illustration, but a sustained visual argument. Across its pages, production and destruction collapse into one field: factory and battlefield, crowd and target, machine and flesh.This is an entirely visual book, yet it asks to be read. Images recur and fracture. Blots, scratches and stencilled marks disrupt photographic realism, breaking pictures down to the minimum signs of human presence in struggle. The viewer is not offered explanation or consolation. Instead, the work demands active engagement — a recognition of the systems that organise violence as routine and normal.First conceived in the wake of 1968 and developed over many years, drawing on struggles in Vietnam, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Chile, Palestine and elsewhere, STOP remains disturbingly current. It does not present war as aberration but as method; not peace as resolution but as managed inequality.The book’s title is neither slogan nor sentiment. It is a demand made in full knowledge of the apparatus it confronts — and of what it would take, materially and collectively, to bring it to an end.
