Thoroughly Modern: The pioneering life of Barbara Ker-Seymer, photographer, and her brilliant Bohemian friends

by Sarah Knights

The life of pioneering photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer

'Thoroughly entertaining... Knights expertly evokes this hedonistic period' The Times

'A picturesque portrayal of a world that sounds as thoroughly maniacal as it was modern' Daily Telegraph

'I just called myself Ker-Seymer Photographs,' Barbara said. 'I didn't think it was necessary to have your sex displayed on the photographs.'

Vivacious, sassy, out to have fun, Ker-Seymer was committed to independence.

One of a handful of outstanding British photographers of her generation, Ker-Seymer's work defined a talented, forward-looking network of artists, dancers, writers, actors and musicians, all of whom flocked to her Bond Street studio. Among her sitters were Evelyn Waugh, Margot Fonteyn, Cyril Connolly, Jean Cocteau and Vita Sackville-West. Barbara Ker-Seymer (1905-1993) disdained lucrative 'society' portraits in favour of unfussy 'modern' images. Her work was widely admired by her peers, among them, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau. Her images as a gossip-column photojournalist for Harper's Bazaar were the go-to representations of the aristocracy and Bright Young Things at play. Yet as both a studio portraitist and a photojournalist, she broke with convention.

Equally unconventional in her personal life, Ker-Seymer was prefigurative in the way she lived her life as a bisexual woman and in her contempt for racism, misogyny and homophobia. Fiercely independent, for much of her life she rejected the idea of family, preferring her wide set of creative friends, with the artist Edward Burra, ballet dancer William 'Billy' Chappell and choreographer Frederick Ashton at its core.

Today, Ker-Seymer's photographs are known for whom they represent, rather than the face behind the camera, an irony underpinned by the misattribution of some of her most daring images to Cecil Beaton. Yet her intelligence, sparkle, wit and genius enabled her to link arms with the surrealists, the Bloomsbury Group, the Bright Young Things and, most gloriously, the worlds of theatre, cabaret and jazz.

With unprecedented access to private archives and hitherto unseen material, Sarah Knights brings Barbara Ker-Seymer and her brilliant bohemian friends vividly to life.

Genres: Nonfiction

358 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 8, 2023

Reviews

[Kitty · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really fascinating biography of a female photographer of the 1920s-1940s - and yet so much more than this! Barbara Ker-Seymer was at the heart of a group of friends who met at art school and who went on to define modernist culture in Britain: the artist Edward Burra painted jazz age street scenes while Billy Chappell joined Marie Rambert's dance company along with Frederick Ashton who would go on to choreograph some of the great modern ballets. Bar became assistant to the society photographer Olivia Wyndham (who might have stepped straight out of Vile Bodies), taking over from her and creating truly iconic images of figures such as Nancy Cunard, Julia Strachey and Kyra Nijinsky. She also worked on commercial fashion photography and, during the war, on stop-motion animated films. In the 1950s she abruptly changed direction and set up a chain of launderettes. This biography is not only very good fun to read, thanks to a wealth of letters which have been brilliantly woven into a pacy and informative narrative, but also highlights the enormous societal changes during the span of Bar's lifetime, from Edwardian childhood to 1990s.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard work. 😓