SAN SEBASTIÁN.- For the first time, Europe is getting a comprehensive look at the work of influential American photographer Tina Barney. Kutxa Fundazioa Artegunea is hosting Tina Barney. Family Ties, a retrospective that spans 40 years of her career and is the largest exhibition of her work ever staged on the continent.

Known for her large-format, color photographs, Barney has built her career on a seemingly simple subject: family. But as this exhibition reveals, her work goes far deeper than a simple family album. "These photographs are about family, about people from the same family who usually live together in their own homes," Barney said in a 1995 interview. "I don't know if the public realizes that we're talking about my family."

Born in New York in 1945, Barney's artistic journey began in the late 1970s. She started by photographing her own affluent East Coast family and their surroundings, a world she understood intimately. Over time, her lens expanded to capture the European aristocracy and upper-middle class, resulting in her renowned series The Europeans. The exhibition includes a selection of these works alongside early photographs and images created specifically for this show.

The exhibition is organized around key themes that define Barney's practice, showcasing how she blends candid moments with meticulously staged scenes. She is considered a key figure in a generation of photographers who brought a new approach to the medium, drawing inspiration from art history, particularly 17th-century Dutch painting and 18th-century group portraits. Barney’s use of large-format cameras and immense prints—often measuring 120 x 160 cm—is a deliberate choice. As she once explained, these dimensions allow the viewer to "enter the image" and discover the incredible detail within, from the texture of fabrics to the color of a dish.

While Barney is celebrated as a portraitist, her true focus is often on the deeper, unspoken narratives of family life. She explores issues of tradition, ritual, and generational connections, sometimes revealing a sense of tension or distance between subjects. "The process of a community repeating events year after year, rituals that become tradition, seems to have always been the main focus of everything I photograph," she noted in 2011.

Beyond her personal projects, the exhibition also highlights Barney’s shift into commissioned work for top-tier publications like W and Vogue, and her fascination with storytelling and theatrical staging. Visitors can see how she brings the same complexity and humanity to her editorial and commercial work as she does to her private artistic practice.

Tina Barney. Family Ties is a monumental tribute to an artist who has spent a lifetime turning her own world into a universal story, proving that the most profound subjects are often found closest to home. The exhibition, produced by the Jeu de Paume, will feature a selection of 54 large-format prints, including both color and black-and-white images.