Tina Barney

“Tina Barney by Peter Galassi is a curated tome of her 43 year career as a chronicler of elite American life. She writes a thoughtful introduction of her childhood in the 50s, which brought on her interest in photography when her grandfather ‘had at least two kinds of cameras hanging around his neck, and they bounced off his fat tummy when he laughed.’ Decades come to an end but Barney’s images define each WASPy period” —Duck Goose

Her iconic tableaux suggest rich narratives or, as she has written, the “synchronization of psychological, emotional, and sociological plots that bind a family together.” Long awaited, this lavish survey is the most definitive book to date on Barney’s work.. Her unstintingly honest portrayal of her subjects, many of whom are family and friends, remains completely original. Internationally acclaimed American artist Tina Barney burst on the scene in the early 1980s with her provocative yet intimate photographs capturing the domestic lives and social rituals of the elite. Straddling the line between candid and choreographed photography, between engagement and detachment, she captures her subjects in a range of rarefied settings, both private and public. In choosing color over black and white and producing large-format prints, she broke the tradition of established fine-art photography at the time. Covering three decades of the artist’s provocative yet intimate large-scale color images capturing the domestic life and private moments

. Her iconic images are in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include The Europeans at the Frist Center in Nashville, the Barbican Centre, London, and at the Museum of Art, Salzburg. Peter Galassi is a former chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in Ne