[6][7][8] His filmmaking methods have been compared to David Lynch, Stan Brakhage, Philippe Grandrieux, Béla Tarr, Alexander Sokurov, Maya Deren and Jean Epstein.
Danish film critic, and former director of the European Documentary Network, Tue Steen Müller has described him as the "Anselm Kiefer of cinema".
[13][14][15] Barley has cited Béla Tarr, Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pedro Costa, Phil Solomon, Jean-Claude Rousseau, and Nathaniel Dorsky among his favourite filmmakers.
Critics and academics have drawn parallels with Sleep Has Her House and the work of Caspar David Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wagner's Götterdämmerung and the ideas of Immanuel Kant, among others.
I shoot what attracts me, random things, animals, variances in light, the water, the stars; simply what draws me in on different days, different nights, in different places.