Edward Barber obituary
The British documentary and portrait photographer Edward Barber, who has died aged 67 from pancreatic cancer, was best known for his five-year-long project on the British anti-nuclear protest movement of the early 1980s. This produced a book, Peace Moves: Nuclear Protest in the 1980s (1984) and the accompanying touring exhibition Bomb Disposal: Peace Camps and Direct Action, as well as a 2016 exhibition, Peace Signs, at the Imperial War Museum, London. His black-and-white photographs are a valuable historic record of the mass activism of the time, but they also highlight his mastery of documentary portraiture.
There is an intimacy to Barber’s photos as evinced by his portrait of a lone young woman on Westminster Bridge carrying a branch, or his myriad images of families, teenagers and pensioners with their protest signs. In one memorable shot, he captured two female Greenham Common protesters lying beneath passing city workers during a staged “die-in” outside the London Stock Exchange. By using his formal discipline as a portrait photographer, Barber singled out what he called “iconic individuals in the crowds” and, in doing so, prefigured the anti-Trump protest photographs that proliferate on social media today.
Peace Moves, London, 1980. Photograph: Edward Barber
Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, Edward grew up in Southsea, where his mother, Barbara (nee Clarke), worked as a seamstress and his father, Bill Barber, was a diver for the Royal Navy. He studied at Southern grammar school and then worked as a cost accountant at the nearby Kenwood factory, playing drums in his spare time. He sold his drum kit to buy his first camera, and moved to London, where he studied for a BA in photographic arts at the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University).
As a 26-year-old mature student on what was then the only degree-level photography course in Europe, he began a photographic exploration of gender, identity and personal expression as part of his major project. It began with a portrait of Quentin Crisp at home in his dust-covered bedsit in Chelsea – later used on the cover of the first edition of Crisp’s memoir, The Naked Civil Servant – and culminated with a series on the Beaumont Society, which, as he later recalled, “embraced the spectrum from drag artists and transvestites to transsexuals living as women and working their way towards sex change surgery”. It remains a pioneering, if relatively unseen, British documentary project.
After graduating in 1976, Barber spent four years as part of the leftwing Camerawork collective in east London alongside other politically driven photographers such as Jo Spence and Paul Trevor. He helped to edit Camerawork magazine, which was launched in early 1976, as well as looking after the accounts and helping to establish a nationwide touring exhibition programme.
With its emphasis on social documentary, political activism and community-based photography, Camerawork was determinedly of its time, depending on fundraising events to keep it afloat and refusing to feature advertising of any kind.
In the City, Stewart Williams, a trader 1999. Photograph: Edward Barber
During this time, Barber also completed three important social documentary projects: Shipyard, a portrait of what he called “an archetypal male-dominated working environment”; Family Units, which revealed the wide variety of living conditions among British people from different backgrounds; and Cheshire Home, in which he photographed people with disabilities in their own individually designed rooms in the Cheshire Foundation Home in Liphook, Hampshire. All three were shot in black and white and marked by an attention to stark formal composition.
It was through his involvement with Camerawork that Barber met the artist and activist Peter Kennard. Inspired by Kennard’s anti-nuclear photomontages, he began photographing demonstrators as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament launched protests in the wake of the British government’s decision in 1980 to house US cruise missiles at Greenham Common, Berkshire.
The following year a CND rally at Hyde Park attracted around 300,000 protesters and a women’s peace camp was established outside the gates of the RAF/USAF air base at Greenham Common. By homing in on individual protesters with their home-made placards, Barber created an archive of the language and symbolism of 80s street protest, the humour as well as the anger and anxiety.
“I was never really a photojournalist or a news photographer,” he recalled years later. “And I’d never worked on the streets and there I was thrown out into crowds, which I am not particular fond of anyway. But because I was really determined to do it, I went ahead … I just zoned in on what I wanted to get from those situations.”
A Love Letter to Sicily, 2011. Photograph: Edward Barber
Throughout the late 80s and into the early 90s, Barber undertook a number of in-depth documentary projects, including Islington’s People (1987) and Home Truths: Living Conditions in Britain (1991). His series Shop, shot in colour and featuring portraits of leading British fashion designers and retailers, was included in the British Council touring show, All Dressed Up: British Fashion in the 1980s (1989).
Barber continued to move with ease between documentary and portraiture, working for a time for the Architects’ Journal and collaborating with the Crafts Council on a long-term project centred on distinguished designers and makers such as Tom Dixon and Edmund de Waal. He created memorable portraits of celebrities, including Sophia Loren, Allen Ginsburg and Glenda Jackson, as well as ordinary people at home or in their workplaces.
In the late 90s, while living in the Barbican, in the City of London, he undertook the first major in-depth documentary project on London’s Square Mile since the Big Bang of 1986. The end result was a small-edition book, In the City (2000) and exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery in 2001. In 2003, his series, 15-18: Teenagers in Their Rooms, was exhibited at Fashion Space, London College of Fashion.
Anemone 1994. Photograph: Edward Barber
Barber was also a subject director in fashion photography at London College of Fashion, where he taught from 2003 to 2012. In 2013, with his wife, the writer Danielle Inga, he continued his long-term chronicling of the changing nature of the working environment in a book, Resolve: An Intimate Survey of Work, which comprised portraits of 40 individuals who ran their own businesses or worked freelance by necessity.
A tireless advocate for thoughtful social documentary photography and a formally brilliant portraitist, Barber continued to write, exhibit and photograph up until he was diagnosed with his illness. He leaves behind a huge and varied, but remarkably consistent, body of work.
He is survived by Danielle, whom he married in 2011, his daughter with Lorie Karlin, Sonya, and his daughter with Liz Hirst, Nina.
Edward Barber, photographer, born 15 May 1949; died 29 January 2017