Slap on some tartan and call myself Ruthie
An essay on Tina Barney
A day at the museum sparks thoughts on envy, nostalgia, and getting bummed out by normal peopleWhether admitted or not, we all like to snoop.
Some welcome the snoop, like the Instagram account of your favourite trad wife, or your oversharing aunt who hasn’t found the privacy settings. For others, it’s less welcomed - like my elderly neighbour who refuses to let me “help her” into her apartment, knowing full-well I’m trying to compare floorplans.
For Tina Barney, her career as a photographer has centered on her wealthy friends and family. Drawing on her own connections with the New York and New England gentry (her family founded Lehman Brothers), she captures the familial and social rituals, both staged and candid, of the American and European elite.
She wasn’t just a voyeur of these realms. She lived in them - and no doubt saw behind the smoke and mirrors of her subjects’ “perfect lives”.
Visiting Barney’s Family Ties exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, I’m immediately reminded of an essay.
In Andre Dubus III’s The Lows of the High Life, the author describes setting out to spend his new-found wealth on three extravagant days in New York. After his best-selling novel was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and made into an Oscar-nominated film, he’d come into the kind of money of which he’d never dreamed (I tried, unsuccessfully, to Google the amount, but figured it was enough for his bank teller to whisper, “Good for you” as they slid across a stack of 100s).
“We eat quickly, and there comes the deflating feeling that for the past twenty-four hours I’ve been the master of a grand circus, but now half the tent is collapsing and some of the lions are getting out.”
Extreme wealth can’t shield us from the mundanity of everyday life.
Your hair will frizz in the humidity. Conversation will dwindle at dinner. A child - or your partner – will ruin your meticulously planned itinerary because “they’re chafing” from the trousers they had made on your Bangkok layover and the synthetic fibers are nibbling at their thighs.
These are the fundamental truths of human existence.
The world, with all its lethargy and boredom and awkward silences, still chafes.
Taking in Barney’s photos, I grapple with these thoughts.
The colors and subjects are both so rich, I want to reverse somersault into her saturated stills. They give me a pang of nostalgia, which is odd, because I didn’t grow up frequenting New England summer homes with women called Kitty and Barb. My family didn’t refer to our various “salles” by their colors (The Orange Room, 1996), and we didn’t have an art advisor who counselled us on the merits of Rockwell vs Rauschenberg (The Trustee & the Curator, 1992).
Perhaps I’m homesick for my 90s childhood, when my parents fed and dressed me and my toughest choice was what contact paper covered my school books that year.
Even then, I romanticised my parents’ stories of “the past” – of their time living in the flamingo pinks of 80s L.A, until they returned home to buy their first house for two magic beans and a Tic Tac.
Or maybe the nostalgia comes from a steady childhood diet of 80s and 90s movies that live rent-free in my mind.
Like these movies, Barney’s Crayola colors and lush tones give a sense of comfort. They exude a wealth of…wealth. They make me feel safe – even if the subjects are standing in a trophy room of antlers (The Antlers, 2001).
These were simpler, more analog times, when global warming hadn’t shortened truffle-hunting season, and your private art curator didn’t bang on about “time in lieu”.
But wait, who’s nostalgia is this anyway? I catch myself again. This is the danger of nostalgia – one evident in the cries of M.A.G.A caps and their blinding red promises of the past. What exactly are we nostalgizing?
Perhaps I’m missing the point of Tina Barney’s work. Afterall, I’m no art critic.
And with a closer inspection of her photos, the inherent tension is clear. Clenched fists, stiff shoulders (Tim, Phil & I, 1989), a nanny waiting in the wings to take a toddler off its parents (The Antique Shop, 2003).
Even the staged photos have an edge. A JKF Jnr-lookalike hovers over his baby in The Christening (1992), willing it to make loving eye contact with him while the child’s mother watches on, nervous.
Still, I want to be in those photos. I want to taste those WASP-y hors d’oeuvres with salmon and crème fraiche.
I want my nanny to lace my baby gums with brandy and knock me out cold while my parents get into the hard stuff and kiss their blood relatives.
I want my floors so waxed I never have to walk. I just glide, room to room, howling out commands for “MORE DELPHINIUMS” while my butler canters, double speed, to catch me on the carpet runner.
I. Want. In.
I’m just about ready to slap on some tartan and call myself “Ruthie” when I find a video in the back room.
It projects footage of awkward father-daughter balloon fights at a BBQ, of bored kids at tennis lessons fiddling with their starched pleats, and stuffy country club dinners where the chat looks, quite frankly, shit. Only when these images come alive do I realise how dead boring they look.
With the sheen of the glossy portraits gone, the subjects look stiff, awkward, normal. Their 80s perms flail in the wind, revealing bald spots and sun damage. The hen’s high tea is begging for phallic straws. And the summer camp pie-eating contest looks downright disgusting as kids smear their faces into perfectly good baked goods, ruining my appetite for crumble.
I turn on my heel in disdain.
As I walk back through the gallery, the photos now remind me of the suffocating melancholy of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, stuck in a pastel prison of Sophia Coppola’s making. I see Tilda Swinton in I Am Love, racing to pack her bag and flee her Milanese manor, her family watching on in horror. (I watched in horror, too, as she leaves behind half her Jil Sander wardrobe).
It’s human nature to look back with nostalgia and rose-tint the past, or to picture greener grasses - a life that could be brighter, richer, better. How ever we see our past, present or future, Barney’s work serves as a reminder to beware the shallows of an image, and assess the depths before diving in.
Perhaps I’ll look back on my photos from today with nostalgia, even envy.
Or maybe a still will surface of me at pie-eating contest, hands tied at my back, defeating my rivals with my snout.
I’ll claim it’s a deepfake. I’ll polish the trophy in secret. You can’t trust a photo, anyway.
***
Tina Barney – Family Ties – is showing at the Jeu de Paume in Paris from 27 September 2024 to 19 January 2025.
All photos courtesy of Tina Barney at tinabarney.com