Blitz and Beyond: The Definitive New Romantics Photo Book

The most astonishing part of Blitz and Beyond: The New Romantic Revolution is not the exhilarating riot of fashion, makeup, and self-invention filling its pages, but the realization that nearly everything pictured passed through Graham Smith’s camera lens.

Given the sheer breadth of the archive, it’s only natural to assume that multiple photographers were involved. Instead, Smith emerges as the movement’s indispensable witness, preserving a fleeting cultural eruption before anyone could fully grasp its significance.

Photographs are punctuated by reflections from key figures in the cultural scene, including Sade, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, the BBC’s Robert Elms, and more. The format recalls the landmark punk chronicle Please Kill Me, in which the authors reconstructed the past through overlapping memories of people who were in the thick of that upheaval.

Voices from the inside

Co-authored with scene insider Chris Sullivan, the book avoids reducing the New Romantic movement to eyeliner, synths, and flamboyant tailoring. Together, their prose maps the world surrounding Smith’s shutter clicks, tracing how one of popular culture’s most visually ambitious underground communities flowered amid recession-weary Britain. Yet, the real heartbeat comes from the people who lived it.

Similarly, the voices threaded through Sullivan’s writing resemble a roundtable of recollections among those who unknowingly redressed England in their own image. The addition of contributor playlists also transforms the book into a multisensory time capsule.

A page excerpt from 'Blitz and Beyond.' — A page excerpt from ‘Blitz and Beyond’ by Graham Smith and Chris Sullivan.

Smith’s viewfinder did far more than document famous faces, clubs, and landmarks. His black-and-white shots, in particular, bottled the milieu at its most unguarded, preserving a brief yet reverberant moment when getting dressed for the night became its own creative discipline. It becomes clear why those spaces became incubators for future artists, designers, writers, and musicians.

“The look was retro, but it definitely felt like tomorrow,” Smith writes. “Everyone was a cog in this stylishly bizarre, wobbling wheel, rolling into the future.”

Plenty of books have chronicled the New Romantics from a comfortable distance, but Blitz and Beyond is in a class of its own. Its pages hold the immediacy of someone who instinctively knew the era deserved to be immortalized, even if nobody yet knew how long its shadow would stretch.