Tina Barney: Fashion

Olney Gleason is pleased to announce Tina Barney: Fashion, a solo exhibition of work by American photographer Tina Barney (b. 1945), on view at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York, from October 24 through November 14, 2026. The exhibition brings together nearly four decades of Barney’s major editorial commissions and campaigns for global fashion brands, between the late 1980s and the present—works that continue to expand the range of the artist’s photography practice. Tina Barney: Fashion is presented concurrently with the publication of the comprehensive monograph of the same title (Aperture, 2026). It marks Barney’s first New York exhibition to follow Family Ties, the major touring retrospective organized by the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2024-2025.

Fashion has played a central role in Barney’s life from a young age: the artist’s mother, Lillian Fox, was a former model whose sense of style deeply inspired Barney. After developing a practice in photography in Sun Valley, Idaho, in the late 1970s, and then relocating to New York, where she exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Biennial in the 1980s, Barney accepted her first commission for Connoisseur Magazine in 1987—represented on the cover of the new monograph by Three Raincoats, Connoisseur, 1988. As in her personal practice, she photographed members of her family and close friends—dressed in Issey Miyake for the commission. In the artist’s words, “These new adventures offered me chances to use my imagination in photography in ways that I never knew existed.”¹

As in all of Barney’s works, the photographs on view draw out her subjects’ lives, real or imagined, to further explore the motif of family ritual. When she continued to make regular contributions to publications such as W, Arena Homme +, and Vogue through the 1990s and 2000s, she began working on fashion campaigns for global brands such as Bottega Veneta, Dior, and Gucci. Barney’s editorial commissions encouraged her to incorporate subjects beyond her own family, including the families of celebrities such as legendary writer Joan Didion in Quintana, Joan, and John, 1999, or of individuals including Florence Welch, Chloë Sevigny, and Austin Butler.

Today, Barney’s editorial and fashion works continue to strengthen the core themes of her practice. As critic Vince Aletti writes in Aperture’s Tina Barney: Fashion: “Barney’s strongest editorial pages are portraits, not just anecdotes. When her fashion photographs connect, it’s because she pushes past convention to a genuine appreciation of the inspiration, craft, and sensitivity that give designer clothes their impact on the page.”² 

Many of the photographs on view were featured in Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2004, the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to fashion photography. Most recently, they were included in the retrospective Tina Barney: Family Ties at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and Kutxa Fundazioa, San Sebastián, in 2024-2025. 

Over the course of five decades, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the repetition of traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. Barney has exhibited extensively across the US and Europe, staging major solo exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2024-25), Barbican Art Gallery, London and Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2005-06), and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1990), among other museums. In 1991, she was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and she received a Lucie Award in 2010. Her work is held by major collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and many others.

¹ Tina Barney, quoted in Tina Barney: Fashion (New York: Aperture, 2026), p. 33.

² Vince Aletti, “Tina Barney’s Sartorial Gestures,” in Fashion, p. 169.