Until September 2023, the Nicéphore Niépce photography museum in Chalon-sur-Saône hosts the work of Kate Barry, who died suddenly in 2013.
My Own Space : this is the name of the exhibition hosted by the Nicéphore Niépce photography museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, dedicated to the work of Kate Barry. From June 17 to September 17, 2023, the museum invites the public to discover a retrospective of the singular photographs of Jane Birkin’s daughter, who died suddenly in 2013.
The exhibition was produced with the support of Kate Barry’s family, who donated to the Nicéphore Niépce Museum all of her color and black and white negatives, her digital production, her contact sheets, a selection of prints as well as its two main exhibitions, we learn in a press release.
A complete photographer, Kate Barry made her debut in 1996, notably by illustrating fashion magazines or photographing so many actresses (eight women by François Ozon, 2002) or musicians, than employees of Rungis (The Mouths of Rungis2009).
A brutal and tragic death in 2013
Born April 8, 1967 in London, Kate Barry is the daughter of Jane Birkin and John Barry. She began her career as a stylist, before devoting herself to photography. “The photo was not obvious. Far from it. It was a lover when I was 16 who gave me my first camera. And it is still a lover who gave me a camera photo much later, at the age of 28. It was a pleasure that I did not see. I enjoyed myself later, when this notion took on importance, when it was necessary to build again. I was able to create my space, a space of my own”, she confided in 2005 on the occasion of the exhibition of her work at the Léo Scheer gallery.
But on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, everything changed: Kate Barry was found dead after falling from the fourth floor of the building where she lived in Paris. She was 46 years old. According to the investigators, who quickly favored the thesis of the defenestration, the photographer was alone in the apartment, closed from the inside, and antidepressants were found on the scene.