Private Research Library
Hudson Street
Library
A curated collection of art, photography, zines, and ephemera,
privately held in a former printing house in New York's West Village.
A curated collection of art, photography, zines, and ephemera,
privately held in a former printing house in New York's West Village.
Hudson Street Library houses a unique collection dedicated to documenting visual culture through the lens of contemporary photography. Our specialized focus areas include New York City, surveillance, female artists, street art, fashion, and music. We emphasize diverse global perspectives, featuring works from Middle Eastern and other underrepresented creators. The library also boasts rare zines, artist books, and special collections on LGBT+ publications, serial landscape photography, and photography of protest.
Our first publication explores the intersection of surveillance and photography through works from our collection. This compilation brings together critical essays alongside visual documentation examining how photography has both served surveillance and critiqued it.
View OnlineCryptography and its popular life. William Friedman's cryptanalysis manuals and the NSA's own declassified histories sit here beside Usborne code books for children and the privacy law of the 1990s: secret writing as a technical discipline, and as something everybody has played at.
51 itemsThe hacker underground publishing itself. The complete run of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, from the 1984 monthlies to the current quarterly, sits here with the manuals the same scene wrote for its own use: phone phreaking, lock picking, network intrusion and the law that chased all three, written by the people doing it.
204 itemsWe welcome submissions from publishers, artists, and friends of the library.
Hudson Street Library
421 Hudson St
New York, NY 10014
Visits are currently limited to artists, publishers, researchers, and students by appointment. Please contact us to schedule.