The central focus of Tina Barney’s predominantly large-scale photographs (born 1945 in New York, lives in Watch Hill, Rhode Island and New York) are portraits of members of her wealthy upper-class family and close friends, such as recorded in the chromogenic color print Jim and Phil at Graduation in The UBS Art Collection.

Before Tina Barney began to study photography, she had already been collecting photographs. This became the motivation for her own photographic work in which she focuses on portraiture, creating a sort of cultural and psychological study of her own American upper class family. For more than twenty years she has consistently photographed her family and friends, portraying and exploring the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, and has opened her personal family album to the public in order to question general issues concerning social behavior, manners, and the search for the essential meaning of our existence. Although at first sight her photographs appear to be snapshots, they are staged and arranged, reminiscent of portrait paintings throughout art history. Within this framework the people act individually and spontaneously, which gives the images a certain theatrical tension and creates a psychological and symbolical impact.

Showing a graduation party in Tina Barney’s Rhode Island garden, Jim and Phil at Graduation acquires its symbolic content through a composition which shows three young men and an older one. They form a diagonal line which starts with the younger men in the bottom right corner of the picture followed by the older man and finally the tree more or less in the center of the composition.

While the young men face to the left, the older man walks to the right. With these details of a composition, dialectically combining youth and age in a garden as an image for a cultivated landscape, and a tree as a metaphor for eternal nature, the photograph Jim and Phil at Graduation refers to the graduation from a highly metaphorical and symbolic point of view. Although the title of the photograph refers to the family members the image as a work of art is symbolically non-personal.

Reference: Tina Barney, Friends and Relations, ed.by Constance Sullivan Editions, 1991.

Tina Barney, Theater of Manners, Zürich-Berlin-New York: Scalo, 1997.