Tina Barney on Photography as a Way of Marking Time Across Generations

Sunday New York Times. 1982
Photo by Tina Barney

Tina Barney on Photography as a Way of Marking Time Across Generations

Interview by Spencer Bailey

March 9, 2023

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.

Tina Barney’s self-portrait, 2023, in her Watch Hill, R.I. home. She finds still-lifes at her home
a relief; she doesn’t have to chase people to get them to pose.Credit...

Tina Barney: The Photographer’s Origin Story

With a show at Kasmin and a new book of rediscovered photographs, both called “The Beginning,” the ethnographer of the elite reflects on finding her voice.

Hilarie M. Sheets

February 24, 2023

Tina Barney was home alone in Watch Hill, R.I., during 2020 and needed a Covid quarantine project. While many were cleaning their closets, the acclaimed photographer exhumed about 1,000 35-millimeter negatives shot in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when she was learning the basics of her craft at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho and turning a lens to rituals and relationships among her affluent circle of friends and family.

Tina Barney, Hot Tub In Snow, 1979. All images courtesy of the artist and Kasmin.

Tina Barney's Crimes of Opportunity

The artist's new exhibition at Kasmin Gallery illuminates the inimitable, self-conscious purview of her earliest work. Here, Kat Herriman, CULTURED's editor-at-large, joins her in conversation.

Kat Herriman
March 3, 2023

Tina Barney's new show at Kasmin gallery is titled “The Beginning” because that’s what it pictures—specifically Barney's own as an artist. Barney picked up her first Pentax in her late 20s, only after she’d become a mom and wife. In fact, it wasn't until she found herself living between Rhode Island and a flurry of Sun Valley Idaho ski resorts, with two children and a husband she’d married at 20, that she decided to start taking art classes. Her local, unassuming school, the Sun Valley Art Center, was not only a convenient springboard, but also surprisingly stacked program where Barney found a nurturing creative community and her earliest opportunities.

Tina Barney / The Beginning

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• Tina Barney THE BEGINNING

  Born in New York, New York, 1945
  

  Lives & Works in Westerly, Rhode Island and New York, New York

  
  

  Barney’s photographs are in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Nicola Erni Collection, Zug, Switzerland; among many others. Barney's work was included in the 1987 Whitney Biennial and has been the subject of major recent exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; the Frist Center in Nashville, TN; the Barbican Art Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and the Museum of Art, Salzburg, Austria. In September 2017, Rizzoli USA published Tina Barney, an eponymous monograph spanning her four-decade international career.

 

“The Tennis Match,” 1979.
Photograph by Tina Barney

Tina Barney’s Searching Early Work

A new exhibition and book, titled “The Beginning,” show the photographer casting about for a method that could honestly capture her upper-crust milieu.
By Vince AlettiMarch 18, 2023
The photographs that Tina Barney calls “The Beginning” (which form the basis of a show at the Kasmin gallery through April 22nd) are set in a marina and on a golf course, in private pools and on broad summer lawns, on Rodeo Drive and Fifth Avenue. But, despite the privileged environs, the mood is anxious and vaguely uncomfortable, as if Barney were searching not just for her best vantage point but for her place in a world that she was born into. A descendant of one of the Lehman brothers, she grew up on the Upper East Side, where she was embarrassed to be driven to school in a chauffeured Cadillac. “I so deeply understood the perfection of my life,” she writes in a brief forward to a new book from Radius, also titled “The Beginning,” that collects this early work. “The splendor of the landscape, the houses and their interiors, and the people I cared for more than words can say.” But, whenever she tried to capture her milieu on film, everything she knew and loved about it seemed to slip away. Only when she realized she could get closer to the truth by staging it—by subtly combining fact and fiction—did her pictures really come together.

 

Starring Florence Welch; Directed by Greta Gerwig;
Photographs by Tina Barney; Styled by Sara Moonves

Birds Nest: Greta Gerwig and Florence Welch Make Their Private Domestic Fashion Fantasy Come Alive

“It’s like Safe meets Grey Gardens meets Rosemary’s Baby.”

by Alix Browne
Feb. 20, 2018

We are in a house. A ramshackle Victorian pile, not far from the ocean. Flocked wallpaper in faded silver and gold. Ceilings cracked and peeling where the rain has found its way in. The house is all doors and secret corners. One room is strewn with empty violin cases and countless unframed oil paintings depicting tumultuous seascapes. Another, inexplicably, teems with butterflies. In the kitchen, among jars of pickles and stacks of canned goods, jugs of cheap juice and boxes of dried pasta, a store-bought birthday cake sits on the Formica table, its pink candles melting onto the soft white icing.

Inside the inner circle of europe’s old-world elite

Tina Barney

Inside the inner circle of europe’s old-world elite

Tina Barney's 'The Europeans' studies the cross-pollination of heirs, heirlooms, and Herrs.

Matthew Whitehouse

24 April, 2017

It's been almost two weeks since Theresa May triggered Article 50, sending the UK hurtling towards a cliff edge and leading many to question where Britain fits in the great landmass known as Europe.

Tina Barney

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Photographer Tina Barney
captures the lives of the upper crust

By A.M. Homes

Photographed by Sebastian Kim

September 12, 2017

Tina Barney is an American icon. For 40 years, she has been making photographs that depict the upper crust, rendering the psychological landscape of rarefied social strata with painterly precision. It’s a world familiar to the artist, who grew up in New York among tribes who attend certain schools and summer in certain places; whose houses are called cottages; and whose gestures, habits, and even hairstyles are passed from generation to generation.