The internationally notable photographer Tina Barney lives among the well-trimmed estates of Watch Hill and has been around such East Coast privilege all her life. So as a self-described “bored housewife,” she became fascinated decades ago with recording the upper class milieu of wealthy isolation. At last week’s Newport International Film Festival, a documentary examined Barney at work on such a project in European homes, providing a rare glimpse into her creative process and interpersonal style.“Tina works very privately, normally,” said Jaci Judelson, the director of Tina Barney: Social Studies. “She’d never been seen at work. She’d never even shown anyone her contact sheets. So I felt privileged to have that access.”
The documentary shows Barney being very meticulous, like a jeweler deciding on a perfect setting for a gem, arranging her subjects in the best room of their opulent home environments, amidst Limoges china and Karastan rugs, not to mention Lautrecs and Picassos. “How a person holds themselves defines their whole existence from their day of birth,” Barney declares in the film. Capturing that, she says, “absolutely fascinates me.” In the book that resulted from this trip, The Europeans (Steidl Publishing, 2005), aristocrats and the merely wealthy stand facing the camera surrounded by their possessions, like maharajas with trophy tigers.
“Dégas is very important to me,” Barney says, sitting across from Judelson at a Newport coffeehouse before the film’s screening. “Because Dégas included the entire surroundings — and what he did with scale and space and how he placed people in a room.”
And yet Barney is not a director instructing movie actors. So much depends upon spontaneous expressions and accidental opportunities of the settings. “If I take one great portrait a year, I’m happy,” Barney says, wryly smiling over her by-now cold coffee. “Oh, yeah.”
And what accomplishes that rare pleasure for her, apart from an image’s formal qualities, such as composition and quality of light?
“I have a picture of a young man I photographed last year,” Barney responds. “And I think what I like is that it’s about a sort of strange age — when you’re 14 or 15 and awkward; you’re still uninhibited, but have a little bit of vanity. So here are all the things that are layered up, that are sort of a crossover in your life, things that I don’t understand about that age with things that I understand.”
“I do think that the camera is a very limiting machine,” Barney adds, “but I still hope to go on trying to use it and find other ways that are interesting to me.”
She is currently straying from her usual subject of static social strata. Barney is photographing the changes she is seeing around Westerly, such as the loss of craftsmen skilled in stone carving. Soon, Barney will venture even farther afield, traveling to China to document changes there.
