Born in 1945 in New York, Tina Barney began collecting photographs in 1971. In 1976, she moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, where she took photography classes and, over the course of the 1980s, developed her own vision, focusing on the lives of the wealthy classes to which she belonged.
Her work can be found in numerous public collections, including those of MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Barney exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 1987 and has been the subject of major recent shows at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and the Museum of Art, Salzburg. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991, and the Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture in 2010. Her publications include The Europeans (Steidl, 2005), Players (Steidl, 2011) and Tina Barney: The Beginning (Radius, 2023). She lives between New York and Rhode Island.