The portrait of political scientist Ernest Barker is rendered in narrow vertical format. In the lower left third of the picture the profile is cut off. The rest of the picture is filled out by shadow. The photographer Lucia Moholy, who had emigrated from Germany, used the visual means of the twenties in this portrait. “This style appears strange and exotic to the broad public in Western Europe. But while people find it interesting and worth talking about, only a few want to have themselves portrayed in this way,” is how Lucia Moholy put it in her 1939 book A Hundred Years of Photography.

Sir Ernest Barker belonged to the wider circle of acquaintances of Lucia Moholy and he lived in Cambridge. Lucia Moholy contacted him again per letter in November 1940 after she had been evacuated from her London apartment on Mecklenburgh Square due to the war on 10 September 1940. She lived intermittently with friends in Putney and had asked her former husband László Moholy-Nagy, who was by then in the USA, for help. As director of the School of Design in Chicago he offered her a job. However, to enter the USA she required a character reference issued by a respected person. She hoped that Professor Ernest Barker, who was a politics lecturer at Cambridge University, would agree to do this for her. Barker wrote to a General Consul with whom he was befriended. However, this was unfortunately unsuccessful and she was not granted right of entry.