Kate Barry’s *My Own Space* brings together a practice shaped by two parallel demands: the public language of fashion and magazine photography, and the quieter imperatives of personal work. Barry (1967–2013) began her photographic career in 1996. Her assignments soon established her reputation, yet they also became a setting in which she sustained an individual point of view rather than surrendering entirely to the conventions of the commission.

The book situates familiar examples of that professional career—including the mother-and-daughter campaign made for Comptoir des Cotonniers between 2003 and 2006, and portraits of actresses created around François Ozon’s *8 Women* in 2002—alongside projects undertaken on her own terms. This relationship matters: Barry’s commissioned images contributed to the visual culture of their period, while her independent work clarified the concerns that persisted beneath changing subjects and contexts.

Among those projects is her 2009 study of employees at the Rungis international market. Landscape, however, is identified as the field in which her sensibility found its fullest expression. Seen across these different bodies of work, Barry’s authorship lies less in a single genre than in her ability to preserve a recognizable gaze while moving between portraiture, commerce, workplace observation, and landscape. The title, *My Own Space*, aptly names that effort to establish a personal territory within—and beyond—the structures of professional image-making.

Published in French by Éditions de La Martinière in 2023, the 256-page volume includes a preface by writer Lola Lafon. Its appearance coincided with an exhibition at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône. For collectors, the book’s significance rests on this concentrated view of Barry’s range: it connects images embedded in the public memory of the early 2000s with less commercial work through which her artistic position becomes more distinct.