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168

TINA BARNEY (American, b. 1945) THE CONVERSATION signed, numbered, editioned and dated

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TINA BARNEY (American, b. 1945) THE CONVERSATION signed, numbered, editioned and dated
TINA BARNEY (American, b. 1945) THE CONVERSATION signed, numbered, editioned and dated "Tina Barney #3776 - 7/10, 1987" in black ink on lower right recto chromogenic color print (Ektacolor Plus) 48 x 60 in. (121.9 x 152.4 cm) 1977 this print is number 7 from an edition of 10 PROVENANCE Janet Borden Gallery, NEW YORK Private Collection, NEW YORK LITERATURE FRIENDS AND RELATIONS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY TINA BARNEY, Washington, D.C., 1991, p. 33 (illustrated) Tina Barney and Andy Grundberg, TINA BARNEY PHOTOGRAPHS: THEATER OF MANNERS, Zürich, 1997, p. 109 (illustrated) Tina Barney has always been most comfortable shooting people and places familiar to her. The world she depicts is one of affluence, a world she belonged to and moved away from, only to return with the ability to see it with objectivity. It was during her time in Sun Valley, Idaho, far away from her native East Coast, that she began studying photography. She found little inspiration in her Idaho surroundings, but began photographing obsessively when she would return to her family's home in Rhode Island each summer. In her journal from 1982, Barney wrote, "The house is the heart, the center of ourselves, the nest, the core of the family, the hope, the continuation, the string between the family and its members whose rooms connect them like veins...even though I choose families (and houses) that I know intimately, I feel, and still do, that I am invading a privacy that every family holds within itself. At least where I come from..." Signs of affluence surround the subjects in this domestic interior. The man has his eyes squeezed shut as if considering disapprovingly a request made by his daughter. In the background, her mother is seen giving the gesture of a flat-out "NO"' There seems to be a spatial hierarchy serving as a metaphor for the hierarchical nature of this family, where mother plays the dominant role and has the final word. Although the father is elevated on stairs, his daughter stands above him, perhaps demonstrating her degree of power to convince her father. Barney has captured a psychological drama about familial relationships. Partly staged, partly spontaneous, Barney transports us "inside large rooms adorned with exquisite and expensive paintings and furnishings, and onto porches and yards that speak of carefree leisure and always-balmy weather. On the one hand, we are transformed into voyeurs, peeping through the camera's keyhole into another world, and we experience the slightly guilty pleasures of social trespass. On the other, we are put in a position of having to judge the very privilege that we are privileged to see" (Grundberg, p. 250). The large format invites us, the voyeurs, almost physically, into this environment of a lifestyle lived in luxury. In his essay for THEATER OF MANNERS, Andy Grundberg makes an intriguing comparison. "Barney's world is, in a curious way, the flip side of Nan Goldin's. While the two photographers focus on widely disparate subcultures and use vastly different styles, their work captures a sense of malaise that is difficult to ignore. The details, art objects, and clothing that Barney's camera describes seem more objects of consolation than objects of envy, in much the same way that the dance clubs, sex and drugs in Goldin's pictures are both alluring in a Romantic sense and, looked at cumulatively, desperate and more than a little sad" (p. 254).
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