Published by Radius Books, 2023. Format: Hardcover, 11.75 x 11.75 inches, 112 pages.
In the summer of 2020, the photographer Tina Barney invited me to her home in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, to look through hundreds of prints of images she made in the early stages of her career. These were images that Tina had never shown or published, and after spending the better part of a day viewing them, it was clear to me that they would make a powerful and revelatory addition to her lauded body of work. Tina asked me to design a book featuring these photographs, and over the course of the next six months or so, we worked together compiling a group of images until eventually I was able to create a full-scale mockup for the book.
With that mockup in hand, Tina reached out to several publishers, eventually finding a home for the project at Radius Books, which published The Beginning in 2023. Radius’s founder, David Chickey, and designer Matt Patalano made some excellent modifications to my original design—including choosing a new image for the book’s arresting cover.
TINA BARNEY DISCUSSES PROCESS BEHIND THE BEGINNING
“It was the winter of Christmas 2020, and I was in Rhode Island where I keep my archives. My entire archive was there, where I spend every day, but I kept putting it off because it was simply too big of an idea. What was crucial was meeting Tod Lippy. I don’t think I ever would have made a book of this work without him. I had all these negatives to go through, and I didn’t know what to do with them. As I was scanning them, if I saw some negatives of puddles on the ground or barn fences, I would put those away. I visually edited them in my mind with no kind of purpose beyond that—either put them away back in the file or keep them. It was [done] in a very clinical way; I never would’ve gotten them finished if I’d stopped and been nostalgic about every image. Then I sent all the scans over to Tod and he designed the dummy.”—Tina Barney