Tina Barney

Tina Barney – Early interest in photography; motifs from her personal sphere

Tina Barney was born in New York in 1945 and spent a sheltered childhood in her well-off Jewish family on the East Coast of America. She became interested in photography at an early age and completed a traineeship in the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York whilst studying art history in the 1960s. Barney’s fascination for art led to Italy for a year of study, after which she began building a private art collection, paying particular attention to photographs. In the 1970s, by now married, she moved with her family to Sun Valley in Idaho. There she took photography courses, mostly out of homesickness, she later revealed. She initially used this acquired knowledge during several summer holidays in Rhode Islan to document the people and living conditions familiar from her childhood, with her own family and its rituals often the motifs of her photographic experiments. 

Artistic breakthrough with large-format portraits of the upper class

In the 1980s, Tina Barney changed to large-format photography, and with this, changed the character of her pictures. Black and white snapshots became colour panoramas, intimate portraits of her surroundings, the privileged upper class. Her preferred models were family members and friends who quickly stepped into the role and willingly staged themselves and their lives for the photographer’s lens. It was these pictures that brought the breakthrough for the photo artist when namely her former employer, the Museum of Modern Art, presented a selection of her works as part of the ‘Big Pictures’ exhibition. What is fascinating about Barney’s photography is the view of an exclusive world, the milieu of the Anglo Saxon-Protestant upper class which was normally closed to outsiders. Whilst Tina Barney pushed the door wide open to a brilliant career, her marriage broke down and she divorced from her husband shortly after her premier as a photo artist. In 1996, she brought her long-term study of the milieu to a conclusion and published the illustrated book Photographs: Theater of Manners as an artistic finale of a unique photo project. 

Celebrated portraitist of vanity, prestige and wealth

As well as photography, Tina Barney also worked with the medium of film, and was responsible as director for cinematic portraits of the photographers Horst P. Horst and Jan Groover. Tina Barney has received prizes and awards for her art, including the Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture in 2010. In art critique, she is often seen as a counterpart to Nan Goldin, who devoted herself as a photographer primarily to the lower class. In her 2005 series The Europeans, Barney portrayed members of the European upper classes, the wealthy heirs in their penchant for self-portrayal. Seeing herself in the tradition of Piere Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, the artist once again succeeded in creating a captivating portrait of human vanity with her carefully selected photographs which almost forcefully stage themselves through their confident body language in ostentatious surroundings. 

Tina Barney lives and works today in Rhode Island and New York.