How her beautiful model mother inspired Tina Barney to become one of the fashion world’s top photographers

The US photographer Tina Barney is arguably best known for her large-format portrait images of some of the richest families in Europe and the US, with an unmatched style and panache, that she’s worked on since 1975.

However, she has also had a long-standing presence in the world of fashion photo with commissions dating back to the late 1980s from publications such as W, POP, Connoisseur, Vogue Italia, The Face and Arena Homme Plus. This is now being recognised in the book Tina Barney: Fashion, published by the non-profit organisation Aperture.

Barney was born in New York in 1945 to a father who was an art collector and a mother, Lillian Fox, who was a model turned interior decorator, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that she understands and feels comfortable within the worlds of fashion and visual images.

Despite only being a couple of inches taller than 5 feet, Lillian Fox established a reputation as a fashion model in New York during the 1930s and ‘40s due to her striking facial beauty and her elegant way of wearing hats.

Fox posed for some of the top fashion magazines, including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and was notably photographed by Horst P. Horst and George Hoyningen-Huene. In fact, Tina Barney appeared in Vogue when aged just four in images shot in 1949 during a holiday on Long island. So, it was almost in the stars that Barney would enter the world of fashion in some guise.

Tina Barney’s route to becoming a photographer was somewhat unconventional and didn’t come early in life. She was already 27, and married with two children, when, in 1972, she began working as a volunteer in the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department, cataloguing prints.

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