Uta Barth

Sources:
Barth, Uta. Uta Barth: At the Edge of the Decipherable, Recent Photographs. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002. Print.

The author notes the relationship in Barth’s work between abstraction and representation, as well as the presence of light as subject. Many of Barth’s works delve into abstracting visual perception through the camera. Barth writes that her aim is to direct the viewer towards inspecting their own process of perceiving in relation to an object. Her work exhibits shifts of scale and shallow depths of field—all part of a curiosity in the “background” of images, in other words, the usual “container” of a subject becomes the object of interest in Barth’s photographs. Her photographs allude to the necessary elements of conventional photography (primarily, light and image framing), while offering the viewer a wholly different point of view.  

Lee, Pamela M., Matthew Higgs, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Uta Barth. London: Phaidon, 2004. Print.

In an interview with Matthew Higgs, Barth describes her childhood as an austere life in Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall and the drastic change brought about by her family’s move to California during her adolescence. A theme of detachment and an interest in the margins and peripherals runs through the body of her work, from which, Barth notes, she does not draw primarily from photographic methods of the past. However, she does cite Vermeer as an unintentional influence on her work, whose handle of light is reflected in her own. Her own work focuses largely on juxtaposition and malleability of meaning through context.