On the 10th anniversary of her tragic death at the age of 46, Jane Birkin’s eldest daughter is the subject of a retrospective designed to show the diversity of her still little-known work, from portraits to fashion photos, landscapes and other “out-of-frame” photographs. A world of fragility and poetry that cannot leave anyone indifferent.
“… She sweeps away worn poses and reflexes […] she wipes the slate clean of gimmicks, she erases caricature. “It’s Vanessa stripped of hair and style, it’s Laetitia’s look, the forgotten body… It’s Emmanuelle’s doubt. […] KB revealed to us all what we had hidden from ourselves, never content with anything other than the absolute.” This is an eloquent portrait of Kate Barry by her half-sister Lou Doillon. It reveals the sensitive, exacting eye, on the lookout for authenticity, of a photographer with an offbeat view of the world.
The same goes for her portraits and self-portraits. Putting her models in uncomfortable positions, exhausting them, she “[waited] a long time if [necessary] for the mask to fall off”, explains Lou Doillon. The result is portraits of unsettling expressive power and depth. Just think of those of her two half-sisters, Lou Doillon – immortalised with a goose in a magnificent sepia-toned landscape – and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who says: “It’s thanks to her that I dared to look at myself and find myself pretty.”
As for the self-portraits, they speak volumes about this fragile woman of the shadows: as Sylvain Besson, curator of the exhibition and director of collections at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône, to which Kate Barry’s family donated all of her negatives and contact sheets, she explains, “She spent her life hiding her face”. Here, buried in a pair of jeans (Self-portrait, October 2, 2000, for Cosmopolitain), there, disappearing behind her hair, “clop au bec”, “se [cacher] et se [noyant] dans le décor “1 , lost in a room full of empty chairs… (Self-portrait, 2001, for Elle)…
An Offbeat Look
In these self-portraits, we can see the same propensity for simplicity as in all her work, whether it’s her fashion photos, such as the mother-daughter campaign for Comptoir des Cotonniers in 2003-2006, or her Gueules de Rungis series for the fortieth anniversary of the famous Halles in 2009, but above all her landscapes – the most personal and accomplished part of her work, and also the most original. “The places photographed whether marginal or abandoned, are imbued with melancholy,” notes Sylvain Besson. He adds: “Kate Barry’s work is delicate, fragile and introspective. Those close to her refer to her landscapes as her ‘real’ photographic work, the one closest to her personality, the one in which her anxieties and silences are best expressed.” When you consider her painful life and the tragic circumstances of her death, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the image of a staircase descending steeply to a deserted beach, a cement wall and a tree lost in the middle of a desert, or a blocked landscape showing the improbable face-to-face encounter between the facade of a council flat and a rock face reflected on wet ground….
- Pierre Lescure on France 5’s “L’œil de Pierre – C’à vous” on September 4, 2023, on “Les Photos profondes de Kate Barry”….curator of the exhibition.
“My own space – retrospective Kate Barry”
Quai de la Photo – Centre d’art photographique
9, port de la Gare, Paris XIII
Until March 20
Publication : Kate Barry – My Own Space, Sylvain Besson, éd. de La Martinière, 2023