ina Barney’s tips for making up with the family The docu-drama is everywhere these days. In the cinema (Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant”), on television (countless ‘realcase’ cop shows), and on gallery and museum walls. In the art/photography world, Tina Barney, (along with Jeff Wall), got there first. In the early 90’s Barney shifted her interest from photographing the seasonal rituals of her privileged, but complex,
family to the production of constructs - family dramas where an individual’s behavior in front of the camera was subtly tweaked by Barney’s mild direction. The resulting tableaux make visible the underlying anxieties and conflicts of every family ever photographed; happy or sad, rich or poor. In Family Portraits, her deceptively modest collaboration with Dianna Ilk, Barney steps away from her technically flawless and lavishly scaled cibachrome prints to produce both a DVD and book, available through OSP. Intimate and truly mysterious, Barney has assembled from early home movies and recent (home?) videos a work
that, while visiting some familiar territory (aging, intergenerational groupings, organized outdoor fun, etc.) also opens the door on several conditions in her work that have been left unaddressed.
“Dreamlike” is a word rarely applied to Barney; employing both portraiture and incident, we move back from the present to the past, and back again. The time-travel feel and flickering, waking dream logic of the images owes a great deal to their being culled from 8mm film, with its shaky silence and blaring sun, while the digital images offer clarity without refuge. Also, the translation from moving to still image (DVD to book) is an effective, if not logical one, for aren’t books of images little handheld movies anyway? Barney is often lazily categorized as a
social insider glorifying a specific, but vanishing milieu, which seems to be a problem for some people… Tell me why Ryan, Terry, Wolfgang, and Nan never seem to have this problem. Tina Barney’s Family Portraits is like any other family’s portrait; images crammed with facts that tell you nothing - familiar yet distant… Unevenly lit vignettes whose meanings only matter for those who take the time to remember.
Tim Maul (New York)

Tina Barney & Dianna Ilk
Family Portraits
Published March 2005

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