Margaret Howell has published "Life and Work," a book of personal photographs, and will exhibit the images at her London store. The project marks a rare turn toward the camera itself for a designer whose career has been built on clothing, interiors and a famously restrained visual identity.

For decades, photography has circulated at the edges of the Margaret Howell brand. Her shops have long functioned as curated spaces — spare rooms where furniture, ceramics and printed matter sit alongside garments — and the company's advertising has favored understated, documentary-flavored imagery over conventional fashion photography. "Life and Work" moves the designer from commissioner to author.

What does the book contain?

The volume gathers Howell's personal photographs, images made outside the demands of her design practice. The title itself signals the interweaving of biography and career: her life and her work have always been closely bound, from her early years in the British fashion industry through the expansion of a label that came to stand for a particular kind of quietly modern British sensibility.

The accompanying exhibition, staged at her London store, will give the photographs a physical presence — and, in keeping with how Howell has historically used her retail spaces, the venue doubles as something closer to a small gallery than a conventional shop floor.

Why does this matter institutionally?

Fashion designers publishing personal photography is not new, but Howell's case is distinctive because her aesthetic has always been so photographic in temperament. The flat, gray daylight of the British Isles, utility clothing, mid-century design, the anti-glamour pose — these are visual values her brand shares with a lineage of British documentary and vernacular photography.

Read against that lineage, "Life and Work" functions less as a celebrity side project than as a designer showing the source material of her eye. Whether the photographs stand on their own as images, or chiefly as context for the clothes and objects, is the question any visitor to the London exhibition will have to settle in person.

The book is available now, and the exhibition of the personal photographs at the London store suggests Howell intends to keep her retail spaces operating as venues for looking — at furniture, at clothing, and now at her own pictures.