NEW YORK, NY.- This fall, the Jeu de Paume, France’s national photography museum, is honoring American photographer Tina Barney, a chronicler of social mores both in the United States and overseas, with her largest European retrospective to date.

“Family Ties,” on display at the Paris museum from Saturday through Jan. 19, will feature 55 large-scale images from over 40 years of Barney’s career.

These range from a 1977 black-and-white photo, “The Flag,” of children unfurling an American flag next to a flagpole, and a 1990 color photo, “Musical Chairs,” of children playing the classic game on a beach while adults watch, to a 2019 color photo, “Two Sisters,” a fashion shoot for Vogue of two young women wearing lace-collared dresses, posed in an opulently decorated room with a fireplace, a gilt-framed painting, antiques, vases and a classical-looking bust.

Large-scale 4-by-5 foot prints, the photos are not displayed chronologically, but rather are organized by themes, including family, rituals and traditions, domestic settings and narrative images.

The museum, which occupies a building that was first opened as a racquetball hall in the Tuileries Gardens in 1862, called Barney “a keen observer of family traditions” whose work focuses on “cultural habits within domestic settings.”

In the exhibition’s catalog, Quentin Bajac, the show’s curator who is also the museum’s director, called Barney “a great admirer of the German photographer August Sander’s observational eye.” He explained in an email that Barney, like Sander, adopted a “slightly distant and nonjudgmental point of view,” despite the clear wealth and status of her subjects.

In the catalog, Bajac noted that, “instead of social critique, Tina Barney prefers a sort of interrogative observation. ‘The only way we can examine ourselves, or the history of our lives, is through photography,’ she wrote in 2017.”

This “interrogative observation” is clear in images such as “The Suits” (1977). Taken at a wedding in Rhode Island, it features three men in seersucker suits, the photo tightly cropped so that the men’s faces are not visible.

In a recent phone interview, Barney, who is 78 and splits her time between Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and New York, said she received an email from Bajac at 5:30 one morning in January 2023 asking if she would like to have a one-person show at his museum in September 2024, when it would formally celebrate its 20th anniversary. Later, Bajac visited her apartment in New York’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, and the two reviewed images to include in the exhibition, choosing a cross-section.

According to the museum’s news release, Barney’s earliest images depict “a world rarely seen in photography, offering the public an intimate look at the inner lives of the East Coast American upper class,” including birthday parties, weddings, family gatherings and vacation spots.

She is a member of that privileged group herself: Her father was a descendant of art collectors and the founders of Lehman Bros., and she grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she attended a famous girls’ prep school, Spence. Barney actually shows some of her relatives in the photos on display.

“Jill and Mom” (1983) depicts her sister and mother; Barney played with perspective in that image, throwing her sister, in the foreground, slightly out of focus. In “Jill and Polly in the Bathroom” (1987), featuring her sister and niece, Barney directed Polly to come toward her before taking the photo, to evoke a narrative.

There is even a 1990 self-portrait of Barney wearing a red raincoat while standing in a large puddle near her home in Rhode Island.

Other works trace Barney’s travels through the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Austria and Germany between 1996 and 2004, where she turned her attention “to social types and customs instead of individuals,” the museum noted in the news release.

“In these works,” it continues, “traditional motifs are often combined with more contemporary features, as figures of the European aristocracy pose in a pictorial manner, reminiscent of British ‘conversation pieces’ of the 18th century.”

Alongside her noncommercial photography (she was originally represented by Janet Borden and is today represented by Kasmin), Barney has been shooting for magazines, newspapers and advertisers since the early 1990s. An example of this work at the Jeu de Paume is “The Limo” (2006), a photo of two young male models in a limousine, one Black and mostly undressed, the other white and wearing a gray suit, shot for Arena Homme +, a British men’s fashion magazine.

In a recent phone interview, Bajac predicted that French museum visitors would be more interested in the American imagery than they would be in the European photos, since Barney’s “autobiography and reportage are at the core” of the exhibition.

For her part, Barney said, “one of the reasons the European pictures are so interesting is that the customs there are so different from ours. The dress code is very different, as are the ways people hold themselves, move around space and greet each other.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.