Tina Barney is best known for her large-scale color photographs of her family and friends in their affluent social milieu, taken over the past twenty years. Born into one of New York's elite Jewish families and raised in a grand Upper East Side apartment, Barney summered with her family in Southampton, New York, and Watch Hill, Rhode Island, along with other families whose social prestige extends for generations. The interpersonal relationships that take place in this familiar world of privilege are the subject of Barney's photographs.

Whereas paparazzi photographs of the wealthy focus on glamorous events that take place in the public eye, Barney's pictures capture casual, often private, moments from an insider's point of view. Her subjects include her extended family reading the Sunday New York Times in the kitchen of the summer cottage, her sister and niece dressed in bathrobes in a pink bathroom, and members of her social circle at the beach. These last images recall Lisette Model's photographs of the French Riviera in the 1930s. However, unlike Model's mocking critique of her elite subjects, Barney's photographs offer an intimate, yet coolly neutral, view of prosperity.

Working with a large-format 4 x 5 Toyo camera that requires a tripod, Barney arranges her subjects in their wood-paneled offices, summer cottages, and art-filled parlors so that the people in the pictures appear spontaneous and unposed. The casual atmosphere is not a product of candid photography but of the intimate relationship between the photographer and her subjects and settings. Like Nan Goldin, Barney is very much a part of the world she photographs, but her pictures relate closer to those of Cindy Sherman as staged tableaux.

In The Trustee and the Curator, two men in suits stand in the Robert Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Barney stated in an interview that the photograph depicts a curator of the Metropolitan Museum with her brother, a trustee of the museum. Barney and her brother are direct descendants of the Lehman family, founders of the investment banking house Lehman Brothers, as well as philanthropists and art collectors. Collecting art has always been a means of garnering social status. For many Jews in the early twentieth century, the acquisition of art contributed to the process of acculturation. Robert Lehman (1891-1969), like other serious Jewish collectors of his time, focused on European painting, particularly Christian art of the Italian Renaissance. Barney's photograph depicts the curator with his hand raised-most likely a gesture of explanation, but similar to a posture of blessing typically associated with Christian iconography-and the artist has described his face as mirroring that of the Madonna behind him.

The photograph's intrigue is less about who the subjects are-they remain unnamed in the title, as Barney's subjects often do-but about the dynamic between the figures and the setting in the staged picture. The title does not indicate which figure is the trustee and which is the curator, nor where the photograph takes place. The photograph, then, is a tableau of a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the elite world of art collecting and philanthropy in the exclusive setting of a museum during nonpublic hours. Through the photograph, the viewer vicariously shares Barney's insider status.