In 2005 Damien Hirst began photographing every dispensing pharmacy in the GreaterLondon area. Shooting both the individual pharmacists behind their counters andthe exterior views of the city's 1,832 chemists, the project has taken over a decadeto complete. The images are brought together in their entirety in this extraordinaryten-volume artist's book, which presents a portrait of the city through the people andplaces that prescribe the medicines we take on a habitual and daily basis.Hirst's career-long obsession with the minimalist aesthetics employed by pharma-ceutical companies the cool colors and simple geometric forms first manifested inhis series of Medicine Cabinets, conceived in 1988 while still at Goldsmiths College.For his 1992 installation Pharmacy Hirst recreated an entire chemist within the galleryspace, stating: I've always seen medicine cabinets as bodies, but also like a cityscapeor civilization, with some sort of hierarchy within it. Pharmacy is also like a con-temporary museum. In a hundred years it will look like an old apothecary. PharmacyLondon similarly embodies the artist's realization of an idea of a moment in time. Thepublication also, however, reads as a distilled expression of Hirst's continuing belief inthe near-religious role medicine plays in our society.What's always got me is that people's belief in their drugs is so unquestionable.Damien Hirst