Thoroughly Modern

The life of pioneering photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer

Thoroughly entertaining... Knights expertly evokes this hedonistic periodThe Times

A picturesque portrayal of a world that sounds as thoroughly maniacal as it was modernDaily Telegraph

I just called myself Ker-Seymer Photographs, Barbara said. I didnt think it was necessary to have your sex displayed on the photographs.

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

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 - all of whom play leading parts in this book.

One of a handful of outstanding British photographers of her generation, Ker-Seymers 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 Harpers 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.

Today, Ker-Seymers 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.