Tina Barney: Tina Isles Barney was born and raised in New York City patrician worldview. She became interested in arts as a teenager. Her first art history studies she has had at the private Spence School in Manhatten. Her husband’s family had a home on Rhode Island and here she starts with her early photography. 1972 she became a volunteer in the photography department at Junior Council of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.. John Szarkowski led the department. Since it has been a family tradition to collect art she early start to collect photography. (The famous Family-Art-Collection is located in the Lehmann Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) 1973 Her family moved to Sun Valley, Idaho and she took photography classes at Sun Valley Art center. She also took first pictures there but it was not what she was looking for. On her techniques: Tina Barney first used a 35mm camera and black and white material. 1978-79.She also started with color material 1981 First use of a 4x5 inch camera for more details and color. 1984 Portable electronic flash to extend the space of action. 1985 8x10 inch camera, THE classic camera. 1986 Studio strobe light and assistant. By these settings, each scene has to be arranged like a studiophotography. On the pictures: At Home in New England (eastcoast), during her holidays at Rhode Island summerhouse, she first has taken so-called "summertime pictures" of the family and her friends. Most of the pictures are staged with a strong tendency to capture gestures "on the fly". A kind of neo-documentary style in which Tina Barney is participant (in self-portraits) and also guide. She offers an attempt to interpret a culture of which she is a part. After Tina Barney has fixed the vantagepoint of her 4x5-inch camera, she asked people to repeat certain activities and gestures. Her focus is on the social landscape of ruling society in USA eastcoast. History documents from inside the US American upper class that nobody has done before. Important documents because "that style of life has changed a lot and its traditions are disappearing". "I can’t conceive of making art about unfamiliar subject matter." Personally She might be influenced by the "street tradition" favored by devotees of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Her arrangements can be compared with Flemish Renaissance painting. The size of her pictures is 4x5 feet, "because of the significance, the preciousness of everything in life". Pictures are in life-size, they are monumental figures like old family paintings in castles They represent in the same way but not anymore in aristocratic castle-galleries but in the 20th century galleries of civil society. The big size is a reference to painting and it transforms narrative details into symbols and statements.. The actors represent the patrician worldview, they are "the others" and that provokes us to think about our own identity. The spectator becomes a voyeur, peeping through the camera and establishing the cliché of WASPness, the White Anglo Saxon Protestants, "the ruling part of US American society, the puritan genetic stock of early English settlers"(A.Grundberg), even when Tina Barney is not personally representing that line by her family tradition. He makes these assumptions, but they are just fictions of the real world. People sometimes react towards the images like they react to the soap opera or moviestars: they call them by their names and identify with the actors: With her sisterJill, her brother Philip, her sons Tim and Phil, the friends Susan, Sheila and Kik and also the step-parents, friends of friends etc, People that have already relations are the favored subjects of Tina Barney and she likes to photograph them in places they feel most comfortable. Light and space organization comes second. Space appears as a metaphor aspect of nearness and intimate. Tina Barney´s body of works in a primary and more general concern appears like a psychological study on emotional relationship between people. Quite comparable with other female photographers in the United States, documenting aspects of subcultural lifestyles at the end of the 20th century. (Nan Goldin etc) Bibliographical note: Tina Barney: Friends and Relations 1991 by Constance Sullivan Editions ISBN 1-56098-048-6 Includes an interview with Tina Barney Tina Barney Theater of Manners 1997 by SCALO Zürich -Berlin-New York ISBN 3-931141-60-8 Texts by Andy Grundberg Andy Grundberg Crises of the Real 1990 Aperture Foundation ISBN 0-89381-400-8 Andy Grundberg Photography and Art, interaction since 1946 April 1987 Andy Grundberg Journal of Visual Culture (Editor)