“The Tennis Match,” 1979.
Photograph by Tina Barney

Tina Barney’s Searching Early Work

A new exhibition and book, titled “The Beginning,” show the photographer casting about for a method that could honestly capture her upper-crust milieu.
By Vince AlettiMarch 18, 2023
The photographs that Tina Barney calls “The Beginning” (which form the basis of a show at the Kasmin gallery through April 22nd) are set in a marina and on a golf course, in private pools and on broad summer lawns, on Rodeo Drive and Fifth Avenue. But, despite the privileged environs, the mood is anxious and vaguely uncomfortable, as if Barney were searching not just for her best vantage point but for her place in a world that she was born into. A descendant of one of the Lehman brothers, she grew up on the Upper East Side, where she was embarrassed to be driven to school in a chauffeured Cadillac. “I so deeply understood the perfection of my life,” she writes in a brief forward to a new book from Radius, also titled “The Beginning,” that collects this early work. “The splendor of the landscape, the houses and their interiors, and the people I cared for more than words can say.” But, whenever she tried to capture her milieu on film, everything she knew and loved about it seemed to slip away. Only when she realized she could get closer to the truth by staging it—by subtly combining fact and fiction—did her pictures really come together.

How Peter Hujar Defined Downtown

Susan Sontag, 1975
Photo by Peter Hujar

How Peter Hujar Defined Downtown

By Vince Aletti

October 9, 2016

Iwas already living in the East Village when I met him, in 1969, but in many ways Peter Hujar defined downtown for me. I’d been in the neighborhood, off and on, for several years, working dumb jobs until I graduated Antioch and moved into a fifth-floor walkup on Twelfth Street, just off Avenue A. I landed a job at Ed Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, a few blocks away, and started writing about music for the Rat, the city’s most radical underground paper, with offices on Fourteenth Street. So downtown wasn’t exactly foreign territory for me, but Peter knew it more intimately, more intuitively than I did; he understood its rhythms, nuances, pleasures, and pitfalls. He went places I never dared to, and hung out with people I’d only read about. He was charismatic and complicated and, it turned out, deeply insecure, with a damaging family history he kept mostly to himself. During the time I knew him, Peter struggled to make ends meet, doing advertising, editorial, and publicity work in between exhibitions that rarely generated enough income to keep him fed. But if he was discouraged—and he often was—he didn’t let it keep him from that evening’s screening, concert, dance performance, press party, night-club opening, or tour of the baths. His hunger helped whet my appetite for new experiences: Charles Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous, the Cockettes, “Pink Flamingos,” the Fillmore East, the Fun Gallery, the back room at Max’s, the Tenth Floor, Fire Island, disco, cruising. It was an exciting time; we took liberation for granted and pushed it to the limits. Downtown felt wide open, full of possibilities. You didn’t have to be rich or pretty, but it helped if you could dance.