Ker-Seymer, Barbara (b. 1905)

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Ker-Seymer, Barbara (b. 1905)

British photographer. Born in 1905, probably in England; studied painting at the Royal College of Art and Slade School of Art, London, mid-1920s.

Barbara Ker-Seymer was one of a number of innovative British women photographers who emerged between 1920 and 1940, and included Violet Banks , Edith Plummer (later known as Madame Yevonde ), Lettice Ramsey , Helen Muspratt , Ursula Powys-Lybbe , and Winifred Casson . Ker-Seymer intended to become a painter, and by her own admission went into photography by accident. After studying painting at the Royal College of Art and the Slade School of Art during the mid-1920s, she apprenticed with London society portrait photographer Olivia Wyndham , the former partner of American photographer Curtis Moffatt. "Olivia was a socialite, also a leader of the 'Bright Young Things,'" Barbara said of her mentor, "so there was always plenty going on and she was invited to a lot of parties where the press were barred but she was allowed to take photographs as she was a friend of the various hosts. My job was to stay up all night after the parties, developing and printing the films in order to take them round to the Tatler, Sketch and Bystander, etc." In 1931, Ker-Seymer was contracted by Harper's Bazaar to photograph theatrical and society celebrities as well as people in the news, and she later moved on to do fashion work with the prestigious Colman-Prentice agency.

Strongly influenced by the German cinema and the seminal book Köpfe des Alltags (Everyday Faces) by Helmar Lerski, Ker-Seymer was known for her experimentation with poses and lighting. She was strictly an interior photographer, working out of a studio on Bond Street, where she often collaborated with Brian Howard, who was known for his bizarre images of society girls encircled in wire. While her work for Harper's, as well as her fashion spreads, reflect some of her innovations, it is the portraits of her friends (Nancy Cunard , Frederick Ashton, David Garnett, and Eddie Sackville-West, among others of the "new intelligentsia") that most clearly defines

her style. In a 1932 portrait of Nancy Moore , an oiled profile shot emphasizing the muscular construction of the face and neck, Ker-Seymer adopts Lerski's method of presenting faces of working people in extreme close-ups. A profile portrait of Raymond Mortimer against corrugated iron (head tilted upward toward the light source while an outstretched hand holds a cigarette in the same light) is dramatic in pose and illumination, as are images of Frederick Ashton against tapestry and Nancy Cunard against a tiger skin. "Here was the new, post-Bloomsbury generation in a setting of industrial metal and soft embroidery," notes Val Williams in The Other Observers, "encompassing the modernists' interest in industrial forms with the aesthete's love of luxuriant surface. It was the quintessential new British photography."

At the outbreak of World War II, Ker-Seymer abandoned photography and joined Larkin and Company, an enterprise that made instructional films for the armed services. "It seemed to be the end of things as we knew them," she said. After 1947, she disappeared from both film and photography. "Ker-Seymer's photography was based almost entirely on her love of experimentation," writes Williams in an effort to explain Ker-Seymer's disappearance. "She never saw herself as a professional photographer, and thrived in the adventurous climate of the early thirties. Without that climate, her work seemed purposeless."