Peter Whitehead's work was right at the core of the sixties ferment, with important documentaries such as The Fall, Wholly Communion,Tonite Let's All Make Love in London and Charlie Is My Darling, the latter still the best portrait of the Rolling Stones. He also did the infamous photo session for 'Have You Seen Your Mother Baby' and the video for 'We Love You'.

Baby Doll is the first publication of a series of photographs taken by Peter in a French chateau with a 'teenage' heiress and a month's supply of drugs and film. It is a dark, labyrinthine journey through fantasies of rape, dismemberment, madness, death, burial... enacted in a stylised, surreal manner. Although marketed as erotica, the book's theme is not primarily sexual, not designed solely to appeal to prurient males.

First of all, the sexual content is vague. Used as fuel for the obsession rather than being its raison d'être. Black claustrophobic backdrops, a jail-like cot - and mirrors everywhere. As though he's making sure on the one hand that we know that none of this is real - and at the same time challenging us to draw the line where it becomes unreal.

The model is also both collaborator and doll. It is in her sometimes self-conscious poses and grimaces that the sombre dreamlike mood begins to crack, and then we see a deeper layer behind the surface - a series of masks within masks, mirror images reflected to infinity.

When we reach the section 'Tulpa', the model's body has become split, fragmented - we no longer see the whole girl. A shot of a crotch, buttocks, a silhouette, intermingling with mannequin parts. The girl is no longer a person. Nor a plaything. She has become a formula - a cypher. Like the female characters in Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition, she is disassembled and reassembled in different juxtapositions in an attempt to resolve some almost mathematical problem.

The girl is actually a projection of Peter himself - a tulpa. Like the central character in his novel The Risen, Peter is become Tiresias in an effort to escape the dismemberment of Osiris. There is also a faint hint of Roeg's Performance. Mirror images, reflecting back and forth. In fact Baby Doll is best seen as an appendix or coda to The Risen and I suggest the prospective buyer acquire them and read them in tandem.

It's strange that Peter Whitehead's works should be (re)appearing at this point in time. From a commercial counter-cultural point of view, the sixties' psychedelia retrospective hit its peak in the late eighties when record companies stopped investing in new bands and the majority of the music buying public concentrated all their energies on changing their record collections to the new (supposedly) improved format.

In the fields of film, literature, etc, a similar thing occurred. Godard films were shown regularly on TV - Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg were on the bestseller lists, for a short time. The word of the moment was 'occulture' and thousands of young people sought out alternative 'qualitative' world-views as antidote to the materialistic death camp mentality of Thatcher's Britain. So where was Peter Whitehead while this revival was at its peak? Why did he miss this opportunity to cash in? Several reasons.

From 1982 through to 1991 Peter was director of the Falcon Centre at Al-Soodah (Saudi Arabia), responsible for everything. The project was wiped out by the Gulf War, Peter leaving for Europe with 125 falcons and precious little else.

The other reason was the fact that Peter never really felt part of the original sixties scene. Always a loner, he viewed most of it as faddish, superficial and exploitative. The vision of the times portrayed in his films is always ironic, pessimistic, jaundiced. So the nineties is probably a more fitting time for Peter's films to reincarnate.

Last year Peter suffered a massive heart-attack and quadruple bypass, his chest torn open - like Osiris, dismembered and violated. It was while recovering from it that this book was conceived, the photos dredged out of Peter's archives and entrusted to Iain Sinclair. From there on to Creation books and the artefact you see here.

More than one man's ghosts are being exorcised here - possibly, those of a whole generation.