Rose Boyt
b. 1958, United Kingdom
Rose Boyt, author and photographer, was born in London in 1958.
In the late 1970s, Boyt worked at Malcolm Maclaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, Seditionaries, and photographed punk friends and customers outside on the Kings Road. Around that same time, Boyt produced a series of portraits of some of her friends and family naked in the bath: she decided that the bathroom was a context in which people might be naked, but it was not about sex.
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York in 1978 when she was still a student at Central School of Art and Design, meeting Andy Warhol, and producing an unpublished album of her photographic impressions of the city. Warhol drew an engagement ring on Boyt’s finger and signed it. Boyt recalled that she “went straight to the World Trade Centre 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 drawn 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 by Lucian Freud, Rose (1977-78), alongside photographs of the artist taken by Boyt in her father’s Holland Park studio during the period of the portrait’s creation.
Boyt’s first novel, Sexual Intercourse, was published in 1989, followed by Rose in 1991, and How’s your Father in 2014. Her recent book, ‘Naked Portrait’ was published in May 2024 – an account that explores her complicated relationship with her father.
https://theclassicphotomag.com/rose-boyt-a-proposal-from-andy-warhol-friends-in-the-bath-and-posing-nude-for-her-father-lucian-freud/
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.