Simon Barker: Through the Looking Glass of Rebellion

24/05/2024

By NOCTURA Magazine

Before the era of Instagram filters and digital ephemerality, there was Simon Barker—better known as Six—a photographer whose work captures the raw heartbeat of 1980s London counterculture. As a member of the legendary Bromley Contingent and close collaborator with Derek Jarman and Leigh Bowery, Barker didn’t merely document a subculture—he lived it.

His photography functions less as reportage, more as memory architecture: grainy, immediate, confrontational. His black-and-white portraits of artists, punks, queers, and eccentrics feel like unsent love letters to a time when identity was constructed on the edge—dangerous, glamorous, and deeply political.

In Barker’s world, the lens is not neutral. It’s complicit. The camera participates in the transformation of the body—painted, masked, lit, undone. Faces blur into personas; beauty becomes weaponized. His work doesn’t strive for perfection—it thrives in the chaos between self-invention and decay.

A recurring subject in his early work is Leigh Bowery, rendered in alien elegance. Through Barker’s eye, Bowery is not merely a club icon but a living sculpture, a question mark in sequins and sweat. These portraits are not just fashion moments—they are acts of mythmaking.

His recent exhibitions, including “I Never Had a Summer Romance” and his inclusion in shows revisiting queer histories, reveal how prescient his work remains. In an era when underground culture is endlessly archived and commodified, Barker’s images retain a sense of risk. They feel like secrets accidentally made public.

Importantly, Barker resists nostalgia. While his archive is rich with moments now considered iconic, his interest lies in process, not preservation. “I wasn’t photographing history,” he once said. “I was photographing my friends.”

Today, Barker’s legacy continues to inspire a new generation of image-makers drawn to intimacy, subversion, and visual honesty. In his photographs, queerness isn’t a theme—it’s a language. Punk isn’t a style—it’s a lens. And beauty? It’s whatever bleeds into the frame when you’re not looking for it.