Family Ties (french text)

Hardcover, 29 × 24 cm
176 pages
98 color and B&W photographs
Textes Quentin Bajac, James Welling
Interview of Tina Barney with Sarah Hermanson Meister
Copublished with Jeu de Paume

Exhibition
Tina Barney. Family Ties
Jeu de Paume, Paris
From September, 28, 2024 to January, 19, 2025

Kutxa Fundazioa,
Saint-Sébastien, Espagne
From July, 11 to October, 2 octobre, 2025
ISBN : 978-2-36511-413-4

Tina Barney's Family Ties immerses us in the intimacy of the photographer's family and friends, who, like her, came from the wealthy classes of the US East Coast. This book, which accompanies the first retrospective exhibition in Europe of this major figure in American photography, presents sixty works - the quintessence of her approach to the medium - produced from the late 1970s to the present day. Taken with a camera, these portraits of the American and European bourgeoisie - at the crossroads between family snapshots and photographic tableaux with meticulous composition - abound in micro-expressions and visual tensions, like so many gestures revealing a kind of derangement that lurks beneath the surface of the photographs.

A keen observer of family rituals, Tina Barney is not only interested  in the relationships between generations and the question of transmission, but also in settings and dress codes. Her non-judgmental shots present complex family compositions captured in intimate contexts that are generally invisible to the outside world.

An essay by exhibition curator and Jeu de Paume director Quentin Bajac introduces the visual corpus. A text by artist James Welling, and an interview by Tina Barney with photography historian and curator, Sarah Hermanson Meister, complete this photographic ensemble. These texts help us to better understand the artist's singular approach: her interest in the concepts of family and ritual, her practice of large format, her art of group composition and the snapshot, and her taste for complex visual experiments.