Sitting at the back of the Olney Gleason gallery in Chelsea, Tina Barney points to Jill and Polly in the Bathroom, a photograph she took in 1987. It’s a picture of her sister and niece wearing matching pink bathrobes in a pink room lined with pink floral curtains. Barney traces her hand along the edges of the mirror and sink, showing me how they form two parallel lines that lead toward the middle. A hairbrush rests perpendicularly at the end of the sink. In the rules of 17th-century Dutch painting, she explains, this is the central point of tension. In the 1980s, the French philosopher Roland Barthes called it the punctum.
Over Barney’s five-decade career, portraits like this one have made her a world-renowned photographer. She often captures members of upper-class families, meticulously arranged in their opulent environments, while caught mid-movement, reaching for their hair or bringing a hand to their lips. Barney’s photographs, frequently printed on enormous sheets of photo paper, have entered the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and have been the subject of exhibitions from London’s Barbican to Paris’s Jeu de Paume.