Covering three decades of the artist’s provocative yet intimate large-scale color images capturing the domestic life and private moments of the American and European elite—her family and friends—this book will appeal to contemporary-art lovers, photography book collectors, and anyone
with an interest in modern culture.
Internationally acclaimed American artist Tina Barney burst on the scene in the early 1980s with her provocative yet intimate photographs capturing the domestic lives and social rituals of the elite. In choosing color over black and white and producing large-format prints, she broke the tradition of established fine-art photography at the time. Her unstintingly honest portrayal of her subjects, many of whom are family and friends, remains completely original.
Straddling the line between candid and choreographed photography, between engagement and detachment, she captures her subjects in a range of rarefied settings, both private and public. Her iconic tableaux suggest rich narratives or, as she has written, the “synchronization of psychological, emotional, and sociological plots that bind a family together.” Long awaited, this lavish survey is the most definitive book to date on Barney’s work.

Tina Barney began her career in the mid-1970s when she started photographing in color with a large-format view camera. Her iconic images are in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include The Europeans at the Frist Center in Nashville, the Barbican Centre, London, and at the Museum of Art, Salzburg. Peter Galassi is a former chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.