Tina Barney

Over the course of her nearly 50-year career, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the repetition of traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. Recognized for her large-format photographs that inspire a narrative, Barney magnifies the textures and colors of her subjects’ clothes, furniture, and surroundings in exquisite detail, drawing attention to the habits that inform their behaviors. Whether photographing her friends and relatives or subjects she has met for the first time, Barney examines each situation with complexity and sensitivity.

Born in New York City, Barney developed her interest in photography as a Junior Council member at MoMA in the early 1970s, which exposed her to fine art photography for the first time. She began practicing photography in Sun Valley, Idaho, where she moved with her family in 1973 until returning to the East Coast in 1982. Spending her summers in Rhode Island, Barney first documented the behavior of her friends and neighbors, caught between intense concentration and restlessness. As a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome between 1996 and 1998, Barney began to travel to six European countries through 2004, where she turned her attention to the social customs of each foreign country. Through the 1990s until today, Barney’s editorial and fashion work for leading magazines and newspapers has sharpened her focus outside of domestic life. Having established her reputation in the realm of portraiture, Barney publicly debuted her work in landscape photography at Kasmin in 2018, a practice she began on her own in the late 1980s.