Tina Barney's upper class

When she was born in 1945 Tina could have followed the path of other American peers born into a large and wealthy banking family. But for Tina Barney, the fact of being a Lehman always seemed natural, not a looming psychological burden to take on, rather a starting point, a stimulus to give voice to one's creativity. So today it is no surprise that the Jeu de Paume is dedicating a major retrospective exhibition to her, the first ever held in Europe. Best known for her large-scale color portraits of her family and close friends in New York and New England, Tina Barney began photographing this family theater in the late 1970s. Her interest immediately focuses on the relationships between generations, the dress codes, the model's links with her living environment, the family rituals that are repeated over time, always identical despite the different modes of representation with which they take shape. The colourful, often large-format, group portraits are both family snapshots and precise staging, and almost seem to be in dialogue with, if not inspired by, the classic paintings of the great masters of the past. Tina Barney has also done a lot of commissioned photography (celebrity portraits for newspapers and magazines, fashion photography), creating photos in which she demonstrates the same complexity, the same sensitivity and sometimes the same humor as her personal work.