Some artists are made, others born. For Tina Barney, an American photographer with a career spanning over four decades, art – and more specifically, photography – runs in her blood; her grandfather was an amateur photographer, her mother a fashion model (and an interior decorator in later life), and her family were art collectors for generations. At the ripe age of nine, she travelled from New York to Paris with her family and visited the Jeu de Paume gallery for the first time; in a full circle moment, now, at the age of 79, she has a major solo exhibition there, aptly titled Family Ties. “It was sort of in my genes to understand what important art was,” she says today, speaking over FaceTime from her home in Rhode Island (she splits her time between there and New York City).
From the beginning, Barney’s photographs have been bound up with notions of family. In the late 1970s, they were her first ever subjects, captured at birthdays, weddings, christenings, barbeques, lunches and beaches across the American East Coast, between New York and New England, offering an unprecedented window into the opulent lives of the American upper class. The interiors in her photographs are lush, the colours deliciously rich, with her subjects, young and old, standing in meticulously staged tableaux that recall the visual grandeur and spatial complexity of Dutch Golden Age paintings. Of her choice to print her work on a large scale, she has said, “I want every object as clear and precise as possible so that the viewer can really examine them and feel as if they are entering the room. I want every single thing to be seen, the beauty of it all: the textures, the fabrics, the colours, the china, the furniture, the architecture.”
In Family Ties, photographs are oganised by theme rather than chronology, with fashion editorials, self-portraits, nudes, magazine assignments, photos of her friends and family, and portraits of the European aristocracy blending seamlessly together; works capture the awkwardness of adolescence, burgeoning masculinity, the eccentricity of family rituals, and hereditary style and body language passed down through generations (case in point: a young boy and his father, arms identically crossed). Famous faces appear too; there’s Julianne Moore at her West Village loft, captured in angelic profile, beckoning to her young son, and a portrait of Leo Castelli and his younger wife standing dominantly behind him, her aggressive hair flick – and black cat – frozen in time (both were shot for W Magazine). Other significant magazine commissions, which do not appear in the exhibition, have included Joan Didion for W, along with Carl Andre and (most recently) Larry Gagosian for The New Yorker.
Barney insists that her photographs are neither a critique of class, nor a critique of her subjects. Instead, it’s her insatiable curiosity about her own life, and the lives of others, that drives her work. “I really wanted to show how much I cared about my existence,” she says. “There were so many people I cared about, and I cared about every living inch that I was surrounded by, that I was born into. I felt that it had to be marked because it was and is so extraordinary.”
Below, Tina Barney talks more about Family Ties.
Violet Conroy: How did you first become interested in photography?
Tina Barney: My grandfather’s love of photography must have made some kind of imprint on me. Then, my mother was a fashion model in the 1930s, and so I saw these extraordinarily beautiful photographs that might have made an impression.
When I was 22 years old, in 1970, a friend asked me to volunteer at the MoMA, and I helped catalogue the photographs. That’s where I became familiar with some of the great photographers that existed. I began collecting photographs soon after that. In 1973, my family and I moved out of New York City to a tiny ski resort in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. There was a tiny art school there called Sun Valley and some of the great photographers in America came there to teach. As a student there, that’s when I first started making my first photographs. But never for one moment did I consider myself an artist because my standards were so high.
, 2007)
VC: Why not?
TB: I was born surrounded by important art – my family were art collectors for generations, so I had been exposed to art my whole life. I was brought to the Jeu de Paume at the age of nine to see a [Henri de] Toulouse-Lautrec show, so it was sort of in my genes to understand what important art was. I knew there was a huge difference between being a living, breathing artist and being a great artist. The other students in the class thought of themselves as artists, but it took me a very long time to really believe I was doing something serious.
VC: How did you come to that understanding?
TB: I got a gallerist, Janet Borden. I also really understood the idea of marketing your work, how much superficiality and bullshit is involved in promoting an artist in the market. Publicity too – making an artist think they’re famous and important is way above the honest truth of the work. I think there’s a false representation of what art is important, what art has quality. Whose decision is that?
“The crime of the iPhone is that this entire generation that exists now will never have any understanding of how the camera works” – Tina Barney
VC: Your photographs feel very interconnected with lots of different art forms. Could you talk a bit more on that?
TB: When I studied at Sun Valley, I met very intellectual, well-read people who not only told me about photography, but about visual perception and colour theory. How many photographers today have really read all the books on colour theory, all the books on visual perception, or know how to create space? People that are educated understand that, and see it in my pictures.
That’s why I made them big, so you could get into the space. Light was very important too, which took years to perfect. That was a big step to start using strobe lighting, and that all had to do with the invention of these pieces of equipment. The paper that I used – which was revolutionary – hadn’t been invented until 1982, when Cindy Sherman, Larry Sultan, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and I all started using it.
All these books behind me [on the shelves] are about that: how to make a work of art. The crime of the iPhone is that this entire generation that exists now will never have any understanding of how the camera works.
VC: You’re quite prolific on Instagram. How would you describe your approach to it?
TB: I don’t put pictures of something I ate the night before or of my grandchildren. I know that sounds very snobby, but I put photographs up of art that I’ve seen. It basically has to do with things that turn me on, that I’d like to share. I look at art a lot. I live in New York City, I go out to look at art with one or two very interesting friends that I’ve had for decades, and we look at art in a very serious way and talk about it. Why not share that?
VC: What have you been looking at recently that you’ve enjoyed?
TB: Francis Alÿs at David Zwirner. It was like going to church, it’s so peaceful, so dear and gentle. I’m a Sunday painter, I’ve been doing watercolours for decades of my own photographs. And then I went to see the Siena show at the Met. At 19 years old, I went to live with an Italian family in Florence; I learned about Italian Renaissance art and learned how to speak Italian, and that’s all in there in my photographs. So that show at the Met is very important to me.
VC: Will you ever show your paintings publicly?
TB: I’m saving those for when I can’t photograph any more. They’re so precious to me because I know how hard they are to do. It’s always that thing that you can’t do that you love the best.
VC: Family is a central theme of your new exhibition and book. What initially made you want to photograph them?
TB: Because they were there. I lived in a small town in Rhode Island, everybody knew everybody, and the people I cared about were right there in front of me. But also the surroundings that they lived in were extraordinary and unusual.
VC: Tell me a bit about how you grew up.
TB: I grew up in a very extraordinary way with beautiful interiors, beautiful clothes, beautiful people. It was a very privileged and hard-to-believe existence.
“I really wanted to show how much I cared about my existence … I felt that it had to be marked because it was and is so extraordinary” – Tina Barney
VC: Would you say fashion is important to your work?
TB: I was very interested in how the clothes that people wear define a time and an existence. And I felt that the clothes people wore matched their interiors. I’d go into families’ closets, and I’d notice that everybody in the family would have the same colour clothing. And clothes also defined the style of the time, the designers of the time, the Martha Stewarts, the Ralph Laurens. And so I thought it was sociologically very important to mark that.
VC: People talk a lot about class in relation to your work, and you’ve openly expressed your frustration with that. You’ve said that people miss the point of the work.
TB: Well, there are two ways of thinking about it. At least the subject matter of the picture brought the viewer in, so I should be happy with that and not complain. But I felt that they were missing the point a lot. I think my work got people’s attention because the world looked opulent, it looked decadent. And yet, if you met me, you would realise how natural and unpretentious I am.
A lot of the reviews [of my work] were tough on me, and it was very upsetting because I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of the people in the pictures because those people were my friends and family. But at least they wrote the review. You know, movie actors have those kinds of problems too – not being considered serious because of the fact that they’re beautiful.
VC: Do you see your work as a kind of photography-based autofiction?
TB: Well, I can’t deny that. I really wanted to show how much I cared about my existence. There were so many people I cared about, and I cared about every living inch that I was surrounded by, that I was born into. And I felt that it had to be marked because it was and is so extraordinary. At the same time, I’m very private. It’s hard to believe that, because I made these huge pictures and exposed so much of my life.
VC: There’s a really striking self-portrait in the book where you’re wearing a red raincoat and standing in a huge puddle. Tell me about that.
TB: I was pretty young, and I hurt my back and I couldn’t really move. I thought I was never going to photograph again. I imagined writing to my dealer, Janet Borden, saying, “I’m sorry, this is it. It’s over.” But somehow I had the physical strength to get out of bed that day. So I was half in pain and very, very anguished because I thought it was over. That’s probably in the picture.
VC: In her book Archive (2023), Sofia Coppola mentioned your photos as an influence on The Virgin Suicides. Are you a fan of hers?
TB: Yeah, and I’ve met her. Everybody idealises someone famous and dreams of meeting them. Not only did I meet her, but I got to show her and her husband around my show. There’s a mutual admiration there. The hunger that she and her husband had for my photographs was just … it was like going to heaven. I’m honoured, and I would love to be caught in a broken elevator with her one day.
VC: What are you working on next?
TB: I’ve been making still lifes with my 8x10 camera in and around my house. I’m really tired of trying to find people to photograph. But I feel like I’ve done that, so I’m making still lifes instead. When I look through that 8x10 camera and there’s no people, I get a lot of intense time to think about how to construct a photograph. And that really interests me.
Family Ties by Tina Barney is on show at Jeu de Paume in Paris until 19 January 2025. An accompanying monograph is published by Aperture, and is out now.
