PARIS.- Zander Galerie Paris opened its exhibition dedicated to Tina Barney’s early black-and-white photographs. Rediscovered by the artist while revisiting her archives during the pandemic, these rarely seen works offer an intimate portrait of American East Coast society in the late 1970s.

Born in 1945, Tina Barney is renowned for her large-scale colour photographs exploring family dynamics and the rituals of privilege. Drawing on her own background and social circle, she began photographing family and friends in the settings of their everyday lives. Deeply attached to the customs and traditions that shaped her world, she sought to preserve them through photography, conscious that they might otherwise fade from memory. Her sensitivity to composition and her attention to the visual details of domestic life became central to her practice. In 1981, she began working with a large-format view camera and colour film, developing the distinctive approach for which she would become known.

The six works on view belong to an earlier chapter of her practice. Made during summers spent in Rhode Island, they reveal a more spontaneous approach that the artist has described as “loose sketches a painter might use to plan for a larger painting.” Working with a 35 mm camera and drawing inspiration from Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, whom she has called “masters of the unaltered photograph,” Barney embraced the immediacy of the snapshot. Black and white allowed her to concentrate on the material qualities of the image, bringing fabrics, hair, glass and atmospheric effects into sharp focus. Faces often remain outside the frame, directing attention instead to gestures, clothing and posture. Suits, white dresses and carefully arranged hairstyles become markers of belonging and social identity. Already present in these early photographs are the themes that have defined Barney’s oeuvre for decades: the codes that govern human relationships and the subtle structures underlying family life.

Tina Barney’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions across the United States and Europe, including major solo exhibitions at Jeu de Paume, Paris; the Barbican Art Gallery, London; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; and Museum Folkwang, Essen. Her work is held in the collections of institutions and museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, among many others. Barney received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991, and the Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture in 2010.

On view from November 5 to January 9, the exhibition is part of the PhotoSaintGermain festival.