Uta Barth

Over the last 20 years, Uta Barth has been steadily producing a body of work that stands apart from the dominant trajectory of photography. That trajectory has always been rooted in making a visual record of things in the world. This descriptive function of photography is so fundamental to our understanding of what the medium is and does that it can be hard even to register alternative approaches. Certainly we can see the traces of the visible world in Barth's photographs. They are not exercises in abstraction. Nonetheless, description of the world is not her primary aim. Instead, Barth is interested in pursuing issues of perception: of how we see as much or more than what we see. In this, she has more in common with artists who have made use of photography sparingly or not at all, such as Robert Irwin, Robert Ryman or Olafur Eliasson, than she does with most other photographers. The title of Lawrence Weschler's book on Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (1982), perhaps best encapsulates this alternative approach to what art can do, or be. Equally, one might think of John Cage, who understood that for us to hear silence it first needs to be bracketed out from the rest of the world that surrounds it. As Barth herself has put it, "most photographs are tied up with pointing at things in the world and thereby ascribing significance to them (and subject and content are mostly one and the same)." Her photographs, by contrast, often hover on the edge of appearing to show nothing at all. Only if the viewer is willing to give contemplative time to them do they begin to reveal their entire content.
Russell Ferguson, excerpted from The Long Now.

Often blurred or with only one element rendered sharply, clinging to the margin of the composition, Uta Barth's deceptively simple photographs of ordinary, ambiguous places are both elegant and challenging. Walls, windows, patches of light on a rug, the glow of an out-of-focus glance toward the horizon: all these provoke phenomenological reflections on perception and subjectivity, often suspending a viewer in the midst of the customary attempt to make sense of what is being seen, to reduce it to an accessible package of associations and meaning.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

UTA BARTH: TO DRAW WITH LIGHT
Text by Paul Soto.
BLIND SPOT SERIES
ISBN: 9780983998938 | US $65.00
Pub Date: 7/31/2012
Active | In stock

UTA BARTH: THE LONG NOW
Text by Jonathan Crary, Russell Ferguson, Holly Myers.
GREGORY R. MILLER & CO.
ISBN: 9780980024241 | US $75.00
Pub Date: 7/31/2010
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

UTA BARTH: WHITE BLIND (BRIGHT RED)
Edited by Charles Stainback. Essay by Jan Tumlir.
SITE SANTA FE
ISBN: 9780970077479 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 6/2/2004
Out of print | Not available

UTA BARTH: MOCA CATALOGUE
Essay by Elizabeth A.T. Smith.
ST. ANN'S PRESS
ISBN: 9780971368101 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 6/2/2002
Out of print | Not available

Uta Barth

"Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall," Barth has said. "This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an almost visceral, physical and personal sense."
Featured image, by Uta Barth, is from Gregory R. Miller's The Long Now.

Uta Barth: To Draw with Light

Blind Spot Series 03

Text by Paul Soto.
Published by Blind Spot Series

In 2011, Blind Spot magazine launched Blind Spot Series, publishing small-format, limited-run artist’s books that present concise suites of images from single bodies of work by important contemporary artist-photographers. The newest in this series is Los Angeles–based Uta Barth’s stunning To Draw with Light, featuring 46 color photographs from the acclaimed . . . and to draw a bright white line with light and Compositions of Light on White series (recently exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1301PE in Los Angeles and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York) alongside new works created specifically for the book. According to essayist Paul Soto’s recent review in Art in America, these works are especially remarkable because they include, for the first time, traces of the artist’s body as she arranges the elements within her photographs--the gauzy curtains in front of her sundrenched windowsill, or the light which projects through her window blinds to create floating geometric monochromes upon her closet doors.

Uta Barth: The Long Now

Text by Jonathan Crary, Russell Ferguson, Holly Myers.
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.

Often blurred or with only one element rendered sharply, clinging to the margin of the composition, Uta Barth's deceptively simple photographs of ordinary, ambiguous places are both elegant and challenging. Walls, windows, patches of light on a rug, the glow of an out-of-focus glance toward the horizon: all these provoke phenomenological reflections on perception and subjectivity, often suspending a viewer in the midst of the customary attempt to make sense of what is being seen, to reduce it to an accessible package of associations and meaning. "Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall," Barth has said. "This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an almost visceral, physical and personal sense." This comprehensive monographic volume presents a definitive overview of Barth's works, fully illustrated with more than 300 full-color reproductions, spanning from her earliest photographs to her most recent. New texts by Russell Ferguson, former Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Holly Myers, art critic and writer; and renowned scholar Jonathan Crary provide critical perspectives on the work of this visionary artist.
Born in Berlin in 1958, and now resident in Los Angeles, Uta Barth is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Tate in London. In 2007 Barth was named a Broad Art Foundation Fellow.

Uta Barth: White Blind (Bright Red)

Edited by Charles Stainback. Essay by Jan Tumlir.
Published by Site Santa Fe

Uta Barth aims her camera at the everyday places that are ignored or overlooked, taking note of the incidental and the passage of time, while being deeply engaged with looking at nothing. Included here are photographs from the series nowhere near, ...end of time, and white blind (bright red).

Uta Barth: Moca Catalogue

Essay by Elizabeth A.T. Smith.
Published by St. Ann's Press

Since 1994, Uta Barth has been creating a series of photographs which consist of blurred images generated by focusing the camera on an unoccupied foreground. These unframed, empty, but lushly seductive images present only background information, implying the absence of subjects, and referring to the function of images as containers of information and the role of the viewer in reading that information. This book is a faithful reproduction of the long out-of-print catalogue which was published on the occasion of Barth's first major museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1996.