Tina Barney

Tina Barney is an American photographer who uses portraiture to capture the

lifestyles and family dynamics of those around her. Born and raised in New York,
NY, Barneys photographic career began in the 1970s. She studied at the Sun Valley
Center for Arts and Humanities in Ketchum, ID, from 1976 to 1979. Barneys largescale color photographs are reminiscent of classical portraiture, but they depict the
confines and lifestyles of modernity, most often of the artists friends and family as
they went about their daily lives in affluent areas of Long Island, New York City, and
New England. Though Barney frequently plays the role of passive observer, the
majority of her works are studied and well-orchestrated scenes, the figures and
settings carefully arranged to portray the image she desires. 1
Her sitters obliged, indulging Barney and her camera at mealtimes, during down
moments, and mid-conversation. Her sister Jill became a favored subject for her
photogenic nature and chameleon presence, but Barney also photographed other
family members: her brother Phil, Jills daughter Polly, and her own sons, Tim and
Philip, as well as her friend Shiela and her daughter Moya. Often, the backdrops for
these subjects are their own highly decorated, if overstuffed, interiors.
Barney notes, When people say that there is a distance, a stiffness in my
photographs, that the people look like they do not connect, my answer is, that this is
the best we can do. This inability to show physical affection is in our heritage. 2
Richard Billingham
Richard Billingham is an English photographer, and video artist. He was born in
Birmingham, in the year 1970, and studied as a painter at Bournville College of Art
and the University of Sunderland. Upon his graduation in 1994 he took part in his
first group exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. 3

"Tina Barney (American, 1945)." Tina Barney Biography Tina Barney on Artnet. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.artnet.com/artists/tina-barney/biography>.
1

"So the Story Goes." So the Story Goes. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/story/barney.html>.
2

"Richard Billingham, 'Arrow' 2000." Tate. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-billingham-2749>.
3

The series of photographs for which he has become known for shows the activities
of his family at home, often his alcoholic father, obese, heavily tattooed mother, and
unruly brother in their council flat in Cradley Heath, part of the West Midlands,
England. His candid body of work was later added to and published in the acclaimed
book Rays A Laugh (1996).
Rays a Laugh is a portrayal of the poverty and deprivation in which Billingham grew
up. These photographs are a stark, painful and often humorous documentation of
the emotional, sometimes violent relationship of his parents and brother. Billingham
has also produced videos that explore his family life in an equally candid manner,
for instance Ray in Bed, a short video of his father sleeping shot in extreme close-up.
Billingham is more interested in themes of boredom and addiction, although he
argues that he only realized this after finishing the series. He states If I was to look
at a photograph that I took that isnt very good I would see it as a memory.
Beyond political or voyeuristic aspirations, by photographing his family, Billingham
discovers himself. His series introduces a young artist still insecure about his style
as he begins to develop an interest in spatial representation that becomes a focus in
his later work.4
Nan Goldin
Born in Washington DC, Goldin grew up in Boston where she began taking
photographs at the age of fifteen. As a teenager in the 1960s, then in New York
starting in the 1970s, Nan Goldin has taken intensely personal, spontaneous, sexual,
and transgressive photographs of her family, friends, and lovers. In 1979 she
presented her first slideshow in a New York nightclub, and her richly colored,
snapshot like photographs were soon heralded as a groundbreaking contribution to
fine art photography. She has since lived in New York, Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo and
Paris, amassing an extensive body of work that represents a fascinating
photographic portrait of our time. 5

"RICHARD BILLINGHAM: Reinterpreting Unconventional Family Photographs:

Returning to Richard Billinghams Rays a Laugh'; Series (2007)." AMERICAN SUBURB X. Web. 9 Dec.
2014. <http://www.americansuburbx
4

"Nan Goldin | Photography | Phaidon Store." Phaidon. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.phaidon.com/store/photography/nan-goldin-9780714859453/>.
5

Goldin herself has commented on her photographic style and philosophy, saying,
My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic... Snapshots are taken out of
love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They're about creating a
history by recording a history.' Her work often breaks social taboos with its explicit
exploration of relationships, sexuality and eroticism, and has also shown the
devastating effect AIDS has had on her community of friends.6

Leigh Ledare
Born in Seattle, Washington in 1976, Leigh Ledare received his MFA from Columbia
University in 2008. He currently lives and works in New York City, NY.
Leigh Ledare uses photography, archival material, text and film to explore human
agency, social relationships, taboos and the photographic in equal turns. Ledares
practice lies in an investigation of how we are formed as subjects, not merely at the
level of identity but at the level of our projected desires, motivations and
aspirations. These inter-relational drives often impose irreconcilable demands on
the individual. His work explores this position of ambivalence as it relates to agency,
representation, self-presentation, and issues produced by the enactment of this
work in the context of the real world. 7
Ledare first gained recognition through his exhibition and artist book titled
Pretend Youre Actually Alive. The book pictures the fantasies and realities of his
mothers life with images alternately graphic, tender, and strange. His distinct but
related bodies of work are studies not only of their visible subjects, but also of
photography itself: how it mediates identity, relationships, love, loss, and, perhaps
above all, human vulnerability. They are also indexes of the relationships of the
artist with othersmother, family members, ex-wife, collectors, anonymous patrons,
etc., which, from the start, have played a central role in Ledare's work.8
Malerie Marder
"Nan Goldin." - Matthew Marks Gallery. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/artists/nan-goldin/>.
6

"Leigh Ledare." Pilar Corrias. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.pilarcorrias.com/artists/leigh-ledare/>.
7

"TC Colley Lecture Series - Leigh Ledare." Rhode Island School of Design. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<https://events.risd.edu/event/tc_colley_lecture_series_-_leigh_ledare#.VF0w50j9pvS>.
8

Marder is an American photographer and artist who lives and works in Los Angeles,
California. She was born in 1971 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Marder studied at
Bard College with Stephen Shore and at Yale University with Gregory Crewdson,
Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Nan Goldin, where she won the Schicke-Collingwood Prize
and John Ferguson Weir Award.
Ever since she began exhibiting her photos in the late 1990s, Marder has explored
the psychosexual undertow of her own intimate relationships, frequently shooting
herself, along with family and friends, in close quarters (including pay-by-the-hour
motels) and, usually, undressed. Her work flirts with prurience, with ideas of
privacy and surveillance, eroticism and pornography, and the complications of love.
Marders work is characterized by the beauty and clear narratives it captures. Her
photographs are real portraits of human physicality, but the careful lighting, and
stylization softens the realism.9
Adrian Paci
Adrian Paci is an artist whose work moves between painting, sculpture,
photography, video, and installation. He was born in Shkodra, Albania in 1969, and
arrived in Italy in 1992. He arrived in Milan with a scholarship to study art. Pacis
videos especially enact the great themes of human experience and reflect on the
consequences of the conflicts and problems of migrant culture.
Adrian Pacis video work A Real Game, 2000, tells a tale of immigration and
displacement through a dialogue between the artist (who remains off-screen behind
the camera) and his young daughter, Jola, shown sitting on her bed. In response to
her fathers questions, Jola describes the differences in their lives and circumstances
that occurred when they moved from Albania, where both parents were university
professors, to Italy, where her mother has worked as a house-cleaner and babysitter, while her father earned an income as an art restorer. Her answers touch on
their precarious predicament as immigrants subject to the whims of government
agencies and bureaucrats. By filtering the tensions and anxieties of their situation

The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/malerie-marder-carnalknowledge-2264637.html>.
9

through his daughters open and innocent delivery, Paci intensifies our sense of his
familys susceptibility to external forces beyond their control. 10
Larry Sultan
Born in Brooklyn in 1946, Sultan was raised mostly in Los Angeles, where his family
moved when he was an infant and where his father worked as a traveling salesman
and later as a vice president for the Schick Safety Razor Company. Not initially
interested in photography, Sultan studied political science at the University of
California at Santa Barbara and later earned a masters degree in fine arts from the
San Francisco Art Institute. 11
His work blends documentary and staged photography to create images of the
psychological as well as physical landscape of suburban family life. Sultans
pioneering book and exhibition Pictures From Home (1992) was a decade long
project that features his own mother and father as its primary subjects, exploring
photographys role in creating familial mythologies. 12
Jessica Todd Harper
Jessica Todd Harper spent much of her childhood wandering around museums with
a sketchbook, copying paintings. This pretty traditional artistic preparation took an
unexpected course when she started making photographs as a teenager. She is
interested in making intimate, psychological portraits, where environment plays a
large role. 13

Distefano, Giuseppe. "Adrian Paci and Those Handshakes in the Square: "I Wanted to Experience
and Get Something '" 1 Sept. 2011. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.
google.com&sl=it&u=http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/cultura/2011-08-31/adrian-paci-quellestrette-192211.shtml?uuid=AaWyBX0D&usg=ALkJrhjqo8072q4cc-NuGtFqe5AM9Wxn>.
10

Kennedy, Randy. "Larry Sultan, California Photographer, Dies at 63." The New York Times. The New
York Times, 13 Dec. 2009. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/arts/14sultan.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1415385587s7UJ9tEhCWcRY2KS9g9vuA&_r=0>.
11

"Larry Sultan | Bio." Larry Sultan Bio Comments. Web. 9 Dec. 2014. <http://larrysultan.com/bio/>.
"Jessica Todd Harper Photography." Jessica Todd Harper Photography. Web. 9 Dec.
2014. <http://www.jessicatoddharper.com/#mi=1&pt=0&pi=2&p=-1&a=-1&at=0>.
12
13

Harper has been depicting her family and friends in large-scale color photographs
since 2000. The project began in graduate school while Harper was losing her
grandmother to the anonymity of Alzheimers disease. Her grandmothers fleeting
and occasional moments of comfort with the formally familiar things, rooms and
people from her disappearing past raised questions for Harper about memory, the
private meanings of things and the interior world of the mind. Harper started to
make pictures about the women in her family- herself, her living relatives, as well as
incorporating ancestors depicted in photographs and paintings from the past. Selfportraits, family portraits and later, portraits of female friends, have been ways of
examining women in domestic environments, often preoccupied with private
thoughts. The pictures address a particular part of identity that is linked with the
internal world, family, friends, and the home. Long exposures, carefully composed
backgrounds and an affinity for natural light are the result of Harpers admiration of
Dutch still life painters and the portrait artists of the Northern Renaissance.14
Chris Verene
Chris Verene was born in 1969 in Galesburg, Illinois. He earned an MFA in
photography/studio art at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA and currently lives
and works in New York City. 15
Verene has been photographing three generations of his family, since 1984. He has
been called a natural storyteller, focusing on the whole intimate truth of human
narratives. Verene has been making documentary photographs about his family's
rural Illinois hometown of Galesburg for the past two decades. The simple color
photographs are unstaged and reflect a plain yet beautiful side of American life that
might otherwise pass by uncelebrated. The project has been exhibited throughout
the world in galleries and museums, published as a major book, and profiled by
many well-known art publications.
As in much of this work, his photographs of his cousin Steve combine deadpan
images with Verenes tersely telling captions in ink written on the actual prints. In
subsequent photographs of his cousin, Verene sympathetically constructs a
narrative of isolation, vulnerability, and ambiguous menace while carefully
"Jessica Todd Harper." Photo Center NW. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://pcnw.org/exhibitions/archive/jessica-todd-harper-portraits-from-private-spaces/>.
14

"Marcia Wood Gallery :: Chris Verene." Marcia Wood Gallery :: Chris Verene. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.marciawoodgallery.com/artist/verene/intro.html>.
15

grounding his subject in the physical details of his immediate environment.

Throughout this series, in fact, Verene deftly contrasts the mundane surfaces of
domestic life in a small Midwestern town with the emotionally spiked drama of his
cousins troubled life.16
Nick Waplington
Nick Waplington is an internationally renowned artist. He rose to prominence with
his Living Room series that is his reaction to "the grainy, downtrodden, black-andwhite interpretation of working-class life."17
Waplington, the eldest of three children, traveled extensively during his childhood
as his father worked as a scientist in the nuclear industry. He studied art at West
Sussex College of Art & Design in Worthing, Trent Polytechic in Nottingham and the
Royal College of Art in London. From 1984 Waplington would regularly visit his
grandfather on the Broxtowe Estate in Nottingham where he began to photograph
his immediate surroundings. Friends and neighbors of his family became his subject
matter of choice. He continued with this work on and off for the next 15 years and
from it came two books (Living Room and Weddings, Parties, Anything) and
numerous exhibitions.
By the late 1980s England had experienced ten years of Conservative government,
the collapse of industry, the rise in poverty and unemployment, and centralized
governments abandonment of people and place. It is in this context that the British
photographer spent four years documenting the daily lives of two working-class
families on a council estate in Nottingham, England. Rather than embracing the
contemporary photographic conventions of social realism, Waplington chronicled
the lives of these families in saturated color, capturing an intimate narrative with
poignancy and an unexpected humor. We are thrust into the raw mechanisms of the
family unit, exposing the viewer to every intimate moment of domesticity and laying
bare the private sanctity of home. Although chaotic visits to local stores and
expectant encounters with ice cream vans are all documented, it is in the living

"Chris Verene." - Biography. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.chrisverene.com/biography.php>.
16

"RED GALLERY." About Nick Waplington. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.

<http://redgallerylondon.com/content/about-nick-waplington>.
17

room of the title that provides the theatrical backdrop to most of the daily
disorder.18

"Living RoomNick Waplington." Claxton Projects. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.claxtonprojects.com/books/nick-waplington/>.
18

Works Cited
The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/maleriemarder-carnal-knowledge-2264637.html>.
"Chris Verene." - Biography. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.chrisverene.com/biography.php>.
"Chris Verene." - Work. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://chrisverene.com/work.php?p=117>.
Costa, Guido. Nan Goldin. London: Phaidon, 2005. Print.
Distefano, Giuseppe. "Adrian Paci and Those Handshakes in the Square: "I Wanted to
Experience and Get Something '" 1 Sept. 2011. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev
=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=it&u=http://www.ilsole24ore.com/a
rt/cultura/2011-08-31/adrian-paci-quelle-strette192211.shtml?uuid=AaWyBX0D&usg=ALkJrhjqo8072q4ccNuGtFqe5AM9Wxn>.
"Jessica Todd Harper." Photo Center NW. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://pcnw.org/exhibitions/archive/jessica-todd-harper-portraits-fromprivate-spaces/>.
"Jessica Todd Harper Photography." Jessica Todd Harper Photography. Web. 9 Dec.
2014. <http://www.jessicatoddharper.com/#mi=1&pt=0&pi=2&p=-1&a=1&at=0>.
Kennedy, Randy. "Larry Sultan, California Photographer, Dies at 63." The New York
Times. The New York Times, 13 Dec. 2009. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/arts/14sultan.html?adxnnl=1&adx
nnlx=1415385587-s7UJ9tEhCWcRY2KS9g9vuA&_r=0>.
"Larry Sultan | Bio." Larry Sultan Bio Comments. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://larrysultan.com/bio/>.
"Leigh Ledare." Pilar Corrias. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.pilarcorrias.com/artists/leigh-ledare/>.
"Living RoomNick Waplington." Claxton Projects. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.claxtonprojects.com/books/nick-waplington/>.
"Marcia Wood Gallery :: Chris Verene." Marcia Wood Gallery :: Chris Verene. Web. 9
Dec. 2014. <http://www.marciawoodgallery.com/artist/verene/intro.html>.
"Nan Goldin." - Matthew Marks Gallery. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/artists/nan-goldin/>.
"Nan Goldin | Photography | Phaidon Store." Phaidon. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.phaidon.com/store/photography/nan-goldin9780714859453/>.
"RED GALLERY." About Nick Waplington. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://redgallerylondon.com/content/about-nick-waplington>.
"RICHARD BILLINGHAM: Reinterpreting Unconventional Family Photographs:
Returning to Richard Billinghams Rays a Laugh'; Series (2007)."
AMERICAN SUBURB X. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/04/theory-reinterpretingunconventional.html>.
"Richard Billingham, 'Arrow' 2000." Tate. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-billingham-2749>.
Rugoff, Ralph. Shoot the Family. New York: Independent Curators International,
2006. Print.
"TC Colley Lecture Series - Leigh Ledare." Rhode Island School of Design. Web. 9 Dec.
2014. <https://events.risd.edu/event/tc_colley_lecture_series__leigh_ledare#.VF0w50j9pvS>.
"Tina Barney (American, 1945)." Tina Barney Biography Tina Barney on Artnet.
Web. 9 Dec. 2014. <http://www.artnet.com/artists/tina-barney/biography>.
"So the Story Goes." So the Story Goes. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/story/barney.html>.