The not-so-discreet charm of the bourgeoisie according to Tina Barney

Pile of « Vogue »chosen furniture, authority of the father, nose in his papers, casualness of the children, slumped in front of the television, perfecto on their back, sneakers on the coffee table… The sum of external signs of wealth would almost eclipse the real subject of this scene of inside: blood ties. Filmed by Tina Barney, in Super 8 and in black and white, The Library (1982) deliberately inaugurates the course closed by another video – Rhode Island Summer (1997) – pointing out, from barbecues to golf games, the summer rites and leisure activities of WASP from the East Coast.

Take the photo out of the book

“These films frame his photographic work as preparatory work”says Quentin Bajac, director of the Jeu de Paume and curator of the first European retrospective dedicated to Tina Barney, seeing in these “raw montages of gleaned moments”most of the “work of constructing space accomplished in his still images”. Between these two “terminals”, a crowd of family portraits, with or without color, some floating in glass picture rails showing through, cutting up the ground floor of the twenty-year-old art center like the rooms of a housePlaced at the right height, just above the eyes, all spread out in 120 x 150 cm, its preferred format, “not as big as Andreas Gursky, probably smaller than Jeff Wall, almost scale 1 “. It remains that “Barney belongs to this generation which, at the end of the 1970s, will amplify the volume of images intended for the wall more than for the book ».

Overall or close-up, the view varies depending on the position of the body and the degree of attention. From a distance, everything seems to be going well: several generations live together under the same roof, clearly sheltered from want. Up close, the varnish flakes when the eye, suddenly caught by a gesture, a pout, one of the thousand details saturating the decor, thinks it can guess the other side. “This inability to show physical affection is in our heritage”maintains Tina Barney, faced with the impression of stiffness given by these loved ones, fatally distant.

At child height

Well born in 1945 in New York, the daughter of a former model converted into an interior decorator and an investment banker who collects his spare time, the octogenarian knows nothing of the failings of his class. “Social satire does not interest him”however, assures Bajac, who finds no more in common with Martin Parr than with the Ralph Lauren campaigns, with which certain critics have, according to the cartels developed, been able to associate it. “The process of a community repeating events year after year seems to have always been the main focus of everything I photograph”summarizes the person concerned, infiltrated but withdrawn, as sensitive to the neutrality of August Sander as to that of the anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Equipped with a battery of flashes and placed on a tripod, the 20 x 25 camera that she handles “against use”like an instant camera, inserting and removing the film shot with eagerness, first alone then with the help of an assistant, plays a large part in this decentered, slightly low-angle look, reminiscent of that of her younger brother Philip- Lorca diCorcia (born 1953), another storyteller. “Isn’t that ultimately the point of view of the child she was? »ventures Bajac, agreeing with the opinion of Barney, for whom photography constitutes “the only way to question the story of your life”.

A brief history of the bourgeoisie

His follows, a priori, a clear path: private schools, aborted studies, marriage, children, divorce. Until this off-piste in Sun Valley, a ski resort in the heart of the Idaho Rockies, where she went into exile in 1974 with her husband and their two sons. There, she followed courses taught by Patrick de Lory and Mark Klett at the Center for the Arts and Humanities, indulging in a passion awakened by her maternal grandfather, an amateur photographer, and maintained by prints signed Robert Frank, Walker Evans or Lee Friedlander, which she bought between two volunteer missions at MoMA. Which acquired, in 1983, Sunday New York Times (1982), morning press review in an opulent and overcrowded dining room, included the same year in the exhibition “Big Pictures by Contemporary Photographers”.

“At the time, photography of the upper classes had no history and few antecedents”recalls Quentin Bajac, citing, apart from the fantasies of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, sunbathing on the Promenade des Anglais, or ball nights in Swiss palaces, respectively covered by Lisette Model and Jakob Tuggener in the 1930s. Never however, the elites had only been seen from this domestic angle. Sally Mann, Mary Frey, Carrie Mae Weems, Nan Goldin… Others than Tina Barney embody this Home Photography then in its infancy, abandoning the anonymity of the street. But she alone has so many privileged people in her entourage.

Nothing has changed

Her interpersonal skills transcend borders: from 1996 to 2004, she photographed “ friends of friends »wealthy from Italy, Germany or England. If the solemn poses and austere expressions betray the weight of traditions more than at home, the fact remains that The Europeans (2005) extends Theater of Manners (1997), a saga whose system reached its limits in China, where she stayed in 2006 and encountered the language barrier. Soon, the image goes blank and Barney, conscious “ for having worn out the genre of the choreographed painting to the limit », enter dallas and Vermeer, De Hooch and Dynastytakes on orders for the press, fashion and advertising.

Gathered in the work Players (2010) – and in the second room of the retrospective – these more directed works, appearing “fewer people », do not have the polished but brazen charm of his first attempts. Recently, before taking advantage of the pandemic to go through her archives, she photographed the grandchildren of those she looked at thirty years ago: “ In many ways, nothing has changed », notes the nostalgic, tirelessly asking the question of the trace. Time passes, determinisms remain.