Tina Barney: Family Ties

Tina Barney started photographing her own circle in the late 1970s. The subjects were New England upper-class families, and she was one of them, which is what makes the work strange. She used large-format cameras to make portraits that feel staged and yet lived-in, the tension between a family sitting for a portrait and a family simply occupying a room never quite resolved.

Family Ties collects 98 colour photographs from roughly 1976 to 2010, the three decades that shaped Barney's reputation. The selection is organised by theme rather than chronology: adolescence, inherited gesture, family ritual, the uncertain space between generations. That structure lets you see how the same preoccupations persist across thirty years, rather than watching a style develop in one direction.

The texts are substantial. Quentin Bajac, director of the Jeu de Paume and commissioner of the exhibition, contributes an essay situating Barney in the broader history of staged photography and its debt to painting. That relationship runs through Barney's work and earlier monographs tended to understate it. Sarah Meister, executive director of Aperture, conducts an interview with Barney herself. James Welling, photographer and professor at Princeton, adds a further text. Between the three, the book does more than contextualise the pictures.

This is Aperture's second Barney monograph in two years. The Beginning (2023) concentrated on her early practice; Family Ties takes the longer view, which makes it the more useful introduction for anyone coming to her work through the Jeu de Paume show.

The book is copublished with Paris-based Atelier EXB, a French house that specialises in photography publications tied to European exhibitions. That partnership matters: it positions the book for a European readership that may know Barney's name without knowing the work in depth.