Tina Barney
Tina Barney
The Beginning
Hardcover
11.75 x 11.75 inches
112 pages
57 images
Radius Books
2023
About the Book:
Over the course of her 40-year career, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the generational repetition of familial traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. In the summer of 2020, at the height of Covid and quarantine restrictions, Barney began to sort through her archive, which contained hundreds of 35mm negatives taken between 1976 and 1980. Finding these long-forgotten images engendered a rediscovery of some of her most intimate memories as a young artist: “the photographs in this book seem like X-rays of my mind and thoughts through the summers I spent with family and friends on the East Coast and in Sun Valley, Idaho.”
Revisiting her work from decades prior, Barney found herself meditating on who and where she was at the time, as well as why and how she approached specific subjects. What was the impetus to capture these moments? The Beginning encompasses Barney’s nostalgic exploration of her earliest work in the medium, and further reflects a self-examination of this formative period through a critical lens.
The photographs of Tina Barney (born 1945) are in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Nicola Erni Collection, Zug, Switzerland. Barney's work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art; Frist Center, Nashville; and the Barbican, London.
Book review by Branden Zavaleta |
The photo book has always been a sort of portable gallery exhibit. It’s for this very reason that they’re such great coffee table books– they let you quietly wander through the halls of an Ansel Adams or Saul Leiter showing while you’re waiting for an appointment or just sipping a cup of tea. It’s also for this reason that the formatting and placement of the photos are so meticulously considered– you don’t want the centrepiece stuffed in with the set dressing, nor do you want so many different ideas that they all get muddled. On the other hand, you might want to make a diptych out of a perfect pair, or create a flow to the emotions in the book.
Tina Barney: The Beginning is no exception to this. Major works take up the whole double page spread, while others sit neatly within a single page while the opposite page is left bare. Sometimes two photos share the spread as partners, and sometimes it’s a montage of frames for you to lean into and flick through like an old View-Master toy.
The white of the blank spaces is as much a character in the book as the photos. But the atmosphere of the book isn’t just that of a sleepy gallery. When you see these golden summer moments, there’s the feeling of flicking through holiday pics from your childhood– of melting icy poles on hot cement, of dripping boardshorts while in line for the diving board.
It’s a different mode for those familiar with Tina Barney’s work, who is most famous for her opulent tableau of her family among upper class estates. The Beginning hints at what her style would later crystallise into– many are expansive images with casual characters– but the expensive, exclusionary aspect isn’t so bold.
You might not know these people or these places, but you know these moments– warm summer days spent trying to cool off, playing sports, or hiding in the shade. And seeing them in the wide spaces of the double pages with Barney’s generous framing gives you something to put in your peripheral vision. It gives you the chance to really immerse yourself in the warmth, the breeze, and the sunlight.
Barney tends not to focus on anything, instead she focuses on nothing– or seemingly nothing. A sort of nothing that gives your eyes nowhere to rest, so you pay attention to the details instead. You notice the familiar texture of the beach towels, the feel of worn wood on your bare feet, the smell of a pool overstuffed with chlorine, trying to keep the raucous waterpark clean. These are fond memories that you want to stay in, to bathe in, and Barney’s carefully casual compositions excite the senses and ignite the imagination.
It’s this careful line between candid and considered– between everyday and elevated– that gels so well with her chosen subjects, and made her later works so powerful; Even the elegantly dressed and overwhelmingly wealthy get caught sneezing in a photo, or gawk at a big catch on the beach. But in The Beginning, the viewer’s interest is less in the lives of the rich, instead it’s a rose-tinted look at a summer of your own. It doesn’t have the plastic bottles bumping against the posts of the dock, or the sticky ice cream wrappers that attach to your foot, but it captures their essence. It captures the moments in between, where you’re waiting quietly for a speech at a birthday party, or running back to your parents to tell them something.
Few people lived in the world that Tina Barney did, but we all like to remember days past with a little more of a golden glow than they had. With colours more vivid, with more comfortable chairs, and shirts without stains.
