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Rose Boyt, author and photographer, was born in London in 1958. In the late 1970s, she worked at Malcolm Maclaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, Seditionaries, and photographed punk friends and customers outside on the King's Road. Around that time, she also produced her Bath series of portraits with various friends and family photographed naked in a bath: she says it was a context ‘in which people might be naked, but it was not about sex’.

Boyt made a first visit to New York in 1978 when still a student at Central School of Art and Design, meeting Andy Warhol, and producing an unpublished album of her photographic impressions of the city. Warhol drew a ring ring on Boyt’s finger and signed it – she recalls that she ‘went straight to the World Trade Center and photographed myself in the Polaroid booth at the top, holding up my hand to show the ring, preserving it for posterity before it washed off’. Self-portrait with Ring by Andy Warhol, New York (1978) was published in an edition with England & Co in 2021.

The exhibition, In the Studio at Ordovas gallery, London in 2019, featured a a major painting of Boyt, Rose (1977-78) by her father Lucian Freud, alongside photographs taken by Boyt in Freud’s Holland Park studio during the period of the portrait’s creation. Boyt’s first novel, Sexual Intercourse (1989) was followed by Rose (1991) and Hows Your Father (2014). Her recent book, Naked Portrait (2024) is an account that explores her complicated relationship with her father.

Since 2020, Boyt has regularly exhibited her photographs with England & Co at Photo London and Paris Photo, and was included in Women's Works: artists working in 1970s & '80s London at England & Co's project space in Mayfair in November 2023.

Read an interview with Rose Boyt in The Classic photography magazine.

Outside Seditionaries i London 1977
40.3 x 27 cm
Silver gelatin print
Edition 1/20 + 1 A/P

Outside Seditionaries ii London 1977
40.3 x 27 cm; paper size 50.5 x 40.5 cm
Silver gelatin print
Edition 1/20 + 1 A/P

Oh bondage! (Bella Freud) 1977
40.3 x 27 cm; paper size 50.5 x 40.5 cm
Silver gelatin print
Edition 1/20 + 1 A/P

Self-portrait with Ring by Andy Warhol New York 1978 /2021
25 x 26 cm
Archival pigment print
Edition of 20 + 2 A/P

In the Studio 11 1978
27.2 x 40.4 cm
Silver gelatin print
Edition of 20 + 2 A/P

In the Studio 7 1978
27.2 x 40.4 cm
Silver gelatin print
Edition of 20 + 2 A/P

In the Studio 1 1978
27.2 x 40.4 cm
Silver gelatin print
Edition of 20 + 2 A/P