“I’ve been taking photographs for most of my life now,” says Tina Barney. “I don’t think I’m going to reinvent the wheel at this point.” Yet, over the course of a more-than-four-decade career, the photographer and New York native has, in many ways, done just that. Harnessing a keen eye for the odd gesture or errant glance, Barney has captured some of the past century’s most memorable portraits.
Barney picked up her first handheld Pentax in her early 30s, as a wife and mother-of-two living between Rhode Island and Sun Valley, Idaho. It wasn’t until the 1980s that she fell for the unsparing granularity of large-format photography, a mode with which she’s since become synonymous. “I would take 400 pictures a year during that period,” recalls the photographer, now 78. “If I got nine good ones, that would be a terrific year.” Her sharp, piercing images of the American and European upper crust are as much about the subjects’ surroundings—opulent abodes laden with the trappings of wealth and tradition—as the people themselves. The result is a delightfully heady, if sometimes merciless, visual cocktail.
This month, a retrospective at Paris’s Jeu de Paume, “Tina Barney: Family Ties,” pays homage to the artist’s 40-year-long inquiry. Photographs shot primarily during Barney’s large-format era capture the blue-blooded East Coast families she grew up around as well as a smattering of European aristocrats and celebrities. She also turns the camera on herself.
Barney does not view this retrospective—her first in Europe—as an end point. Currently, she’s immersed in a series of still lifes staged in her Rhode Island home (one beguiling linen closet has proven a fruitful subject). The motivation behind this intimate turn is less an investigation of her own emotional landscape than a formal exercise. “It’s like solving a mathematical problem,” Barney asserts. “I don’t care that it’s a linen closet—there’s nothing emotional in it. I’m just thinking about making more pictures.”
