Tina Barney: Family Ties

Tina Barney’s keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with sixty large-format works imbued with a spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common.     In the late 1970s, Tina Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday but often hidden life of the New England upper class, of which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast. Developing her portraiture further in the 1980s, she began directing her subjects, giving an intimate scale to her large-format photographs. These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie—a landscape of hidden tension found in microexpressions and in, what Barney calls, the subtle gestures of “disruption” that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux. Family Ties collects sixty large-format portraits from the three decades that defined Barney’s career—accompanying the first retrospective exhibition of the artist in Europe at the Jeu de Paume, Paris. The book includes an essay by Quentin Bajac, the exhibition’s commissioner and director, as well as an interview with the artist by Sarah Meister, the executive director of Aperture, and a text by the artist James Welling. These texts illuminate the artist’s approach to large-format photography, her ongoing interest in the rituals of families, and her personal ideas of composition, color, and the complex relationship between photography and painting. Tina Barney: Family Ties is copublished by Aperture and Atelier EXB.  

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 176
Number of images: 98
Publication date: 2024-11-14
Measurements: 11.3 x 9.5 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115889

“Two or sometimes three generations of the same family are carefully staged by Barney within these settings, which hint at continuity in the values and lifestyles of American and European society, but also the seeds of change.”—Financial Times

“Known for applying her distinct style to both posed and candid portraiture, Barney places the viewer inside the subject’s world . . . effectively transporting readers into the upper-middle-class milieu that Barney has embedded herself in.”—Vanity Fair

“In Family Ties, photographs . . . capture the awkwardness of adolescence, burgeoning masculinity, the eccentricity of family rituals, and hereditary style and body language passed down through generations.”—AnOther

Tina Barney (born in New York, 1945) is an American photographer best known for her large-scale color portraits of family and close friends in New York and New England. Her books include The Europeans (2005), Players (2011), and Tina Barney: The Beginning (2023). She lives in New York and Rhode Island.
Quentin Bajac has been director of the Jeu de Paume since 2019, after having been the head of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2013 to 2019 and curator for photography at the Musée National d’Art Moderne–Centre Pompidou from 2007 to 2012.
Sarah Meister is executive director of Aperture, following more than twenty-five years at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she curated numerous exhibitions, including Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 (2021), Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020), and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (cocurator, 2017).
James Welling has produced a continuously evolving body of images that engages the history and technical parameters of photography.  He is a recipient of the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York, and teaches at Princeton University, New Jersey.