Exhibition: ‘Tina Barney: Family Ties’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 28th September, 2024 – 19th January, 2025

Curator: Quentin Bajac, director of Jeu de Paume

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
Jill and Mom
1983
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

I wonder whether you have seen those tv crime shows where the cops are grilling a suspect, and for fear of incriminating themselves they give a “no comment” interview…

What do you think of the composition of these photographs?

No comment

What do you think of the lighting in these photographs?

No comment

What do you think of the use of colour in these photographs?

No comment

What do you think of the people depicted in these photographs?

No comment

What do you think of the allegedly subtle critique of these patrician families, these far from “ordinary people”?

No comment

My mother said to me, if you can’t say anything constructive don’t say anything at all.

No comment

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thanks to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
The Reception
1985
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
The Children’s Party
1986
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
Jill and Polly in the Bathroom
1987
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
Tim, Phil and I
1989
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Jeu de Paume showcases the vibrant, singular work of influential American photographer Tina Barney, who is best known for exploring intergenerational familial rituals and the subtle nuances of human connection.

Spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, the exhibition marks the artist’s first European retrospective. Born in 1945, Tina Barney began taking photographs of her relatives and friends in the late 1970s. A keen observer of family traditions, her work focuses on cultural habits within domestic settings. Her colourful and large-scale portraits may appear as family snapshots at first glance, however many have been carefully staged by the artist, creating intricate tableaux that establish a dialogue with classical painting. This exhibition will also include work from Barney’s editorial practice in which portraits of celebrities and models for fashion magazines and luxury brands share the same complexity, sensitivity, and humor found in her fine art practice.

Spanning the breadth of Barney’s career, the exhibition will include fifty-five large-scale works from Barney’s earliest through her most recent series, including those previously unseen in Europe.

Text from the Jeu de Paume website

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
Musical Chairs
1990
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
Self-Portrait in Red Raincoat
1991
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
The Young Men
1992
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

In “Family Ties,” Tina Barney’s keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with a sense of spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common.

In the late 1970s, 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.

These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie – a landscape of hidden tension found in micro-expressions and in, what Barney calls, the subtle gestures of “disruption” that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux.

Newly released, “Family Ties” brings together sixty large-format portraits from three decades that have defined Barney’s career, alongside an interview between the artist and Aperture’s executive director Sarah Meister, and texts by Quentin Bajac and James Welling.

This volume coincides with Barney’s first retrospective exhibition in Europe, on view at Jeu de Paume through January 2025.

Text from the Jeu de Paume Instagram page

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
The Entrance Hall
1996
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
Mr. and Mrs. Castelli
1998
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
Julianne Moore and Family
1999
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

Tina Barney (American, b. 1945)
The Reunion
1999
Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York
© Tina Barney

In September 2024, Jeu de Paume, Paris, will showcase the vibrant, singular work of influential American photographer Tina Barney, who is best known for exploring intergenerational familial rituals and the subtle nuances of human connection. Spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, Tina Barney. Family Ties marks the artist’s first European retrospective.

Born in 1945, Tina Barney began taking photographs of her relatives and friends in the late 1970s. A keen observer of family traditions, her work focuses on cultural habits within domestic settings. Her colourful and large-scale portraits may appear as family snapshots at first glance, however many have been carefully staged by the artist, creating intricate tableaux that establish a dialogue with classical painting. This exhibition will also include work from Barney’s editorial practice in which portraits of celebrities and models for fashion magazines and luxury brands share the same complexity, sensitivity, and humor found in her fine art practice.

Tina Barney’s experimental approach to photography emerged in the late 1970s. In 1981, she transitioned from working with a hand-held Pentax 35mm camera to a tripod-mounted Toyo 4 x 5 view camera. Through the 1980s, Barney’s early images revealed a world rarely seen in photography, offering the public an intimate look at the inner lives of the East Coast American upper class. At various vacation spots, birthday parties (The Children’s Party, 1986), weddings (Bridesmaids in Pink, 1995), backyard barbecues (Tim, Phil, and I, 1989) and family lunches in and around her house in Rhode Island, Barney probed the social habits of her subjects, exposing a fine line between intense concentration and idle restlessness. Her models pose like actors in a theater or film scene as the artist quickly replays micro-gestures and gives informal instructions. With the spontaneity of a snapshot, The Reception (1985), for example, sees Barney carefully direct the guests of her sister’s wedding.

Between 1996 and 2004, Barney traveled to Italy, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Spain and Germany, turning her attention to social types and customs instead of individuals. In these works, traditional motifs are often combined with more contemporary features, as figures of the European aristocracy pose in a pictorial manner, reminiscent of British “conversation pieces” of the eighteenth century. Working in large format allows Barney to magnify the exquisite details found in the textures and colours of her subjects’ clothes, furniture, fabrics and decor, drawing particular focus to the visual and material cultures that inform their mannerisms.

The exhibition will explore the theatrical dimension of Barney’s mise-en-scènes, with special attention to her work with her subjects and the construction of space. Barney’s work underscores a certain narrative dimension or tendency. In the early 1990s, Barney began working for several magazines and newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph, W, Arena Homme Plus, Hommes Vogue International and Vogue US, fuelling her attention to the formal and compositional possibilities of photographs where the costumes, setting, and circumstances are already defined.

Departing from a strictly chronological approach, Tina Barney. Family Ties will present specific themes that have traversed Barney’s various bodies of work over four decades. For example, family – a key theme from the very beginning of Barney’s photographic practice in 1976 – may be found in Jill and Mom (1983), an intimate scene where the artist’s sister and mother address the camera in relaxed postures. Nearly twenty years later, The Daughters (2002) revisits the dynamic of a mother and daughter in a portrait of a French family whom Barney had not previously met.

Tina Barney was born in New York in 1945. Her mother, Lillian Fox, was a model turned interior designer. Her father, Philip Henry Isles, came from a long line of investment bankers and art collectors. Throughout her childhood, she was exposed to the practice of photography by her maternal grandfather. She began experimenting with photography when she and her family moved to Sun Valley, Idaho in 1973, where she lived until returning to New York City in 1983. Barney has exhibited her work at major venues across the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1987. Today, her work is included in many prominent collections around the world. She lives and works between New York and Rhode Island.