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Rose BoytRose Boyt, writer and photographer, was born in London in 1958.
As a child she lived for a year and a half on a three-masted sailing ship plying trade round the Baltic then emigrated to the Caribbean, from where the family was repatriated in 1967 and took up residence in Islington.
In the ’80s, Rose Boyt worked at London clubs including Freds and the Cafe de Paris, and with friends ran Battlebridge Road in King’s Cross, one of the first warehouse parties, and started the legendary Hot Sty with musicians Sean Oliver and Bruce Smith. At Soho’s infamous Wag Club she performed with an all-women DJ team including Bionic Rhona, Andi Oliver and Neneh Cherry.
She made a first visit to New York in 1978 when she was still a student at Central School of Art and Design, meeting Andy Warhol, and producing an unpublished album of her photographic impressions of the city. Her first novel, Sexual Intercourse, was published in 1989, followed by Rose in 1991, and How’s your Father in 2014.
The exhibition, In the Studio at Ordovas gallery in Savile Row London in 2019, showed for the first time the series of photographs Rose made in her father Lucian Freud’s Holland Park studio in the late 1970s. In 2020, she exhibited some of her 1970s Bath series of photographs with England & Co in a group presentation to accompany the digital iteration of Photo London that year. In 2021, she is exhibiting selected images from her In the Studio and Bath series as part of England & Co’s stand at Photo London in Somerset House. She will also participate in the gallery’s presentation at Paris Photo later in the year.
