Richard Barnes divides his time between commissioned work and personal projects. He looks at architecture as artifact and, placing it within the context of archaeology, challenges our conceptions of the way we inhabit and represent the built environment.

His photographs are in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the Harvard Photographic Archive. He was a recipient of the Rome Prize for 2005-06.

His work from Rome resulted in the exhibition "Murmur (Flow Room)," which was cited by Art Forum magazine in their annual “Best of 2007” roundup of exhibitions for the year.

Barnes has lectured extensively, at such venues as the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and Parsons School of Art in Manhattan, as well as for the lecture series of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Friends of Photography, where he has also done workshops. He has worked as adjunct professor/visiting artist at the San Francisco Art Institute and has taught in the same capacity at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.