France's culture minister pays tribute to British photographer Kate Barry

 
Tribute: French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti
KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images
Peter Allen12 December 2013

France's culture minister paid a moving tribute to British photographer Kate Barry today after her apparent suicide in Paris.

The 46-year-old daughter of actress and singer Jane Birkin and the late James Bond composer John Barry was found dead on Thursday night.

She had fallen some 80ft from the balcony of her fourth floor apartment in the upmarket 16th arrondissement of the French capital.

Paying tribute, culture minister Aurelie Filippetti offered ‘heartfelt and loving thoughts’ to ‘a family we all love, the French love’.

Ms Fileppetti said Ms Barry had become ‘an outstanding photographer who understood ‘the very meaning of pictures, staging, light and composition’.

Ms Barry also had a deeply troubled side to her life, however. At 17 she underwent treatment for drug and alcohol addiction in central London.

She had a close relationship with groups including Alcoholics Anonymous and set up a centre for addicts in France in 1993.

Ms Barry’s body was found soon after 6.30pm, along with packets of antidepressants in her locked, empty flat.

This morning it was sealed off, and being examined by police. A source close to the investigation said: ‘The initial theory is suicide.’

Ms Barry’s apartment is just a few miles from the flat where Ms Birkin herself now lives on Paris’s Left Bank.

Ms Barry is also survived by a son, Roman de Kermadec, who is 26 and believed to be with Ms Birkin today.

Ms Barry’s half-sister was actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, the daughter of Ms Birkin and the late French singer Serge Gainsbourg.

Ms Birkin, who also has a daughter called Lou Doillon with the director Jacques Doillon, has frequently spoken about her closeness to her daughters.

Earlier this year, she said: ‘I've never had a week without having all three of my daughters on the telephone.

‘My eldest daughter, Kate, looks most like me. She's a photographer. She had a Polaroid camera in her hand from a young age and photographed her sisters all the time.’

Ms Barry’s parents separated in 1967, the year she was born in London, and she was brought up until the age of 13 by Ms Birkin and Gainsbourg, who died in 1991.

Ms Barry began her career as a professional photographer in 1996 and her first major exhibition was at the Bunkamura Gallery in Tokyo in 2000.

She went on to produce pictures for a variety of publications including British Vogue and the Sunday Times magazine.

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