Eva Barrett

With only a small half-plate camera, she created her own photographic method that resembled hand-drawn sketches, developing a personal version of the so-called "pastel portraiture".

She achieved her effect by retouching the photograph with a few very light pencil strokes, managing to create subdued images but with particularly dense blacks, thus maintaining the characteristics of photography and portraiture.

[1][2][3][4][5] Introduced to Roman society by the wife of the Italian foreign minister, Antonino Paternò Castello, Marchese di San Giuliano, who had previously been the Italian ambassador in London, her unique style proved very popular with wives of foreign ambassadors and her services were much in demand to take their photographs and those of their children.

Her popularity only declined after the arrival in Rome from Florence around 1928 of Ghitta Carell,[8] a Hungarian Jewish photographer who attracted many of Barrett's clients.

By the twenty-first century, however, her career had been largely forgotten,[5] although her work continued to appear in exhibitions such as: Since 2017 Catlin Langford, a photography curator, writer and researcher, has been trying to locate Barrett's photographs.