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.