For more than a decade, from the late 1970s into the 1980s, Brian Griffin made photographs for the music industry that did not behave like ordinary promotional pictures. POP, published by GOST Books in 2017, gathers that work: more than 160 record covers drawn from sessions for album sleeves, singles, posters, and press, made with over a hundred bands and musicians. Ian Dury, The Clash, Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, Iggy Pop, Kate Bush, The Specials, and Elvis Costello are among the names represented, and a substantial portion of the material had not previously been published. Across 392 pages the book presents Griffin’s music photography, including graphic and portrait work made for records and promotional materials.

The volume carries essays by Terry Rawlings and Paul Gorman. The publisher’s edition appears with four different cover colours, and the book includes more than 160 record covers from over 100 bands and musicians, including previously unpublished images.

Brian Griffin is the photographer; Rawlings and Gorman are credited as authors. That distinction matters for anyone who knows how easily music photography is flattened into a single signature style. Here the emphasis falls on the range of the commission and the discipline of the response.

For collectors of photography that sits at the intersection of art direction, portraiture, and popular music, POP is a concentrated record of a working period. It documents a time when the record sleeve was a serious visual platform, and it does so at a scale that few single-artist volumes attempt.