New Volume Surveys Tina Barney’s Acclaimed Portrait Photography upon Her First European Retrospective

New York, October 8, 2024—Aperture is pleased to announce the release of Tina Barney: Family Ties, a new survey from internationally acclaimed artist Tina Barney. Featuring sixty large-format works from the three decades that have defined Barney’s career to date, Family Ties is a collection of keenly observed portraits that offer a window into a rarified world of privilege and are imbued with a spontaneity and intimacy that remind audiences about what they 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 includes an intimate interview with the artist by Sarah Meister, the executive director of Aperture, as well as an essay by Quentin Bajac, the exhibition’s commissioner and director, 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.

The release coincides with the first European retrospective exhibition for Tina Barney, debuting at the Jeu de Paume, Paris—on view through January 2025—before traveling to the Kutxa Fundazioa, San Sebastián, Spain, in July 2025. Tina Barney: Family Ties is available at aperture.org/books.

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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.

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Tina Barney: Family Ties is copublished by Aperture and Atelier EXB.

Aperture’s programs and operations are made possible by the generosity of our board of trustees, our members, and other individuals, and with major support from 7G Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, Documentary Arts, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Ishibashi Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Henry Luce Foundation, Mailman Foundation, MurthyNAYAK Foundation, Grace Jones Richardson Trust, San Francisco Foundation, Thomas R. Schiff Foundation, Jane Smith Turner Foundation, Stuart B. Cooper and R. L. Besson, Kate Cordsen and Denis O’Leary, Thomas and Susan Dunn, Michael Sonnenfeldt, Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts, with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

About Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through its acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.

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Press contacts:
Lauren Van Natten, Aperture, publicity@aperture.org