| Sunday New York Times. 1982 Photo by Tina Barney |
To the photographer Tina Barney, a scene can be captured in an instant, but a place is best framed over generations. Across her 40-year-long career, Barney has become internationally renowned for photographing, in this very way, her particular milieus—family, friends, and neighbors in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, most notably, but also in New York and Sun Valley, Idaho. Growing up in New York City with an art collector father, a model-turned-interior-decorator mother, and an amateur photographer grandfather, Barney’s childhood was one brimming with visual culture and artistic influences. Her path to photography, though, was rather circuitous: In her early 20s, Barney joined the Junior Council at MoMA, for which she helped catalog prints in the museum’s department of photography. Immediately intrigued by the medium, Barney then began visiting photography galleries and collecting pictures by the likes of Edward Weston and Robert Frank (then available for around $100 or $200 apiece). Soon enough, she purchased a 35-millimeter Pentax and began making photographs herself.