Tina Barney Photographs: Theater of Manners

New York photographer, Tina Barney, was born to a wealthy upper-class New England family, and has turned this pedigree into an artistic study of her world. The viewer witnesses dense moments of emotion-filled social rituals – weddings, Christmas dinners and cocktail parties in rich surroundings – fraught with tensions, frictions and the search for real connections. Pain and loneliness inhabit even the most carefully furnished houses. Barney’s painterly tableaux vivants often have several levels of meaning, revealed in her careful compositions. In this monograph, she is revealed as a combination of artist and visual anthropologist.