A few hours after I got my first vaccination for the novel coronavirus, I asked my friend to tell me about her favorite photographers. Sitting at her kitchen table covered with books about William Eggleston, Carrie Mae Weems, Stephen Shore, Vivian Maier, et al., I listened as she explained that she likes photography because it focuses on what's real and not real. I remember this because, at the time, I couldn't tell if the chills I was experiencing were a real or psychosomatic reaction to the vaccine.
"Oh, this is a good one," she said, handing me a book of photographs by Tina Barney.
A simple way to classify Tina Barney's work is to say she makes photographs of wealthy families. Her subjects hang Picasso paintings on their walls, dress their sons in polo shirts and double-breasted sports jackets, and they gather in sitting rooms where the mantles are gilded, and the drapes are corniced. But the richness of Barney's photographs lies in their composition.
Since many of her photographs take place in confined interior spaces, Barney uses different visual tools to guide viewers into and through these spaces. Things like: the repetition of an accent color at different levels in a photograph, the use of the Renaissance triangle, or an open window to expand the picture plane all occur in Barney's work.
If you let your eye glide through Barney’s photographs for a few minutes you might find yourself more interested in how her subjects are relating to one another than the things surrounding them. You may notice a man staring earnestly at his new wife on the occasion of their wedding reception or not one but two boys (possibly brothers) standing so close together on a diving board that you almost missed the second set of legs or a dad looking up from his issue of Barron’s paper to pay attention to his son.
In an interview with the Museum of Modern Art, Barney shared that she decided to make families a focus of her work because back in the late 1970s, she had a sense that the American family was "disintegrating" and wasn't "close enough" and "didn't show enough affection."
A disintegrated and unaffectionate family of great wealth lies at the center of the HBO show Succession, which will air its final episode tonight. For four seasons, the show has circled around one big question, who will take over the Roy family's sprawling right-wing media empire. The Roys (a fictional family inspired by the Murdoch family) consist of Logan, an aging patriarch, and his four children, three of which want their chance at running the family business. Each of the Roy siblings attempts to execute complex business maneuvers to prove to their dad that they are worthy of taking over his role.
I binged season three of Succession last summer when, after a few more vaccines, I finally caught Covid. In the haze of sickness, I lacked the brain power to follow the show's business storylines. I saw the show for what it truly is, a family drama where the position of CEO represents, to the Roy kids, the possibility of love, acceptance, and belonging. The show's opening credits, which I never skip, drive that point home.
Succession's opening, which loops together vintage footage of the Roy family with shots of New York City and clips from ATN, their Fox-like news network, shows there’s no separation between the Roys’s personal and professional lives. The family is the business.
Like Tina Barney's photographs, the old images of the Roys show them in domestic spaces amongst the trappings of wealth. The Roy boys are dressed in three-piece suits, a young Shiv walks a pony, their mother lounges by the pool alone, and a young boy appears to plays tennis without a partner. Unlike Barney’s photographs, the Roy family images don’t contain a sense of intimacy, they capture physical and emotional distance.
The opening is set to a pulsating composition of pianos, strings, and drums. The score and images act as a hypnotic invitation into the world of the Roys, a world that is relatable, unfamiliar, depraved, funny, and terrifying all at once. A world where moral compasses never point north and money is never enough. A world that is real and also not real.
THE EXTRAS
If you watch Succession and have any ideas/predictions about how it ends, do tell! (I’m rooting for Kendall no matter what.)
Gerri for CEO!
Not me suddenly deciding to watch Succession now that it’s giving Tina B!!! 🤩