Tina Barney

"What people see in my pictures comes from the fact that I care very much about my subjects, and know the environment, the surroundings, and the lifestyle because it's my life. I don't think anyone else could do quite what I do."

"Since I have a view camera, that takes a certain amount of planning. The first step is always to find my vantage point, where i stand, which designates my attitude about the situation...The amount of courage I have in directing people depends on who I'm photographing."

"Metaphorically, [the photographs] might be my way of saying, 'Everything looks fine here, but be careful because it all could crumble.' "

"I do have my own palette. I give credit to my mother, who was a model and is an interior decorator. She has an extraordinary sense of color, and a lot of the interiors in my photographs happen to have been done by her."

"It seems to me that there are viewers out there who actually care about the people in my pictures. They definitely can relate to them, and I love that idea."

"I love it when people call the subjects by their first names, like soap opera stars or movie stars, and that they realize how much I care about them- also, that they might see what is important to me, which is how these people get along with each other. It's not the lifestyle and the interiors and those kinds of small things that matter."

"That's really my primary concern - to investigate how one person treats another...I also want to show them how I feel about them."

-All quotes by Tina Barney from the Smithsonian Series book Friends and Relations: Photographs by Tina Barney, 1991.