Even when Barney is clearly in his element, at a garden party, in an art gallery, or with a woman preening in a wallpapered guest room, he doesn’t know where to stand or what he really wants to look at. locate the problem. “In the beginning, I would never have dared to direct someone he was photographing,” he writes. When he tried to ask one of his young children and two friends to stand in three places around a backyard pool in Bel Air, the result was forced, as he notes: “I envisioned something else, something more fluent”. Still, he includes that image in the exhibition and at the end of the book, and it is one of the few early images to appear in “Theatre of Manners.” Her failure apparently haunted her, but it didn’t stop her from continuing to explore the possibilities of scenic photography, or what she calls “direction.” But, the more Barney watched, the more aware she became of how rarely the people she grew up with touched or connected in any way. “I thought family members didn’t show enough physical and emotional affection for each other,” she writes. If the only way to imagine or bridge that disconnect was to get people together for a photograph, she would find a way to do it.
Barney’s introductory text in “Theatre of Manners” is remarkably revealing. Even after having mustered the courage to organize family and friends for photos of him, he writes, he still felt that he was “invading a privacy that every family has within itself.” Growing up, he was never allowed into his parents’ bedrooms, he explains, and “going into the living room was almost daring, like he was crossing some kind of ‘off limits’ border. “. When even casual intimacy is considered transgressive, insisting that people meet to take pictures was a form of rebellion. Barney writes, in one of a series of undated journal entries, “I want to get in, because it’s the only thing worth doing. . . . I want to know what others feel. Otherwise, it’s too lonely.” In today’s world of photography, when conceptual strategies and random tourism rule, Barney’s unique sincerity couldn’t be less fashionable or more valuable, and it sets her apart. Her work can be sharp and affectionate, but she is not satirical or apologist.In recent years, she has stopped photographing family and friends, and her work, both in editorials and elsewhere, has become less personal and more illustrative. “Beginnings,” is regrouping and going back to his roots, as if to remember where he started and how far he’s come. Even if the earlier work doesn’t suggest obvious ways forward, it’s a reminder of what made Barney matter once he found His point of view.