NB Photography : Unit 32 Experimental Photography - Reaserch

Reaserch
Uta Barth

Uta Barth Photo by David Horvitz

Uta Barth (born 1958 in Berlin, Germany) is a contemporary photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Barth is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05.

Barth received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Davis and an Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1990 to 2008, she was a professor in the Art Department of the University of California, Riverside, where she is currently a professor of art emeritus. After receiving the MacArthur Fellowship in October 2012, she noted that she still plans to teach on a part-time basis because teaching forces her to "put language to" what she is thinking.

Uta Barth's work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Tate Gallery in London; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Her work is exhibited regularly and has been shown in one-person and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Stockholm, Sweden, Düsseldorf, Germany, Bilbao, Spain, and Tokyo, Japan.

Since the early 1990s, Los Angeles–based artist Uta Barth has examined photographic and visual perception—how the human eye sees differently from the camera lens and how the incidental and atmospheric can become subject matter in and of themselves. That is to say, she is perhaps less interested in where the camera is pointing than the act of looking through the lens in the first place.

The works that brought her to international attention, the series Ground and Field, presented photographic blurs caused by focusing the camera on an unoccupied foreground; these lushly colored images tested connections between the descriptive clarity of photography and the haze of memory.

The 2002 series, white blind (bright red), which was rooted in the process of staring at a tree outside her window, explored optical after-images as literal and metaphorical modes of perception. And in 2007, Barth produced Sundial, a series of photographs in her home at dusk. Made at the moment when light begins to transition and fade, these images operate between positive and negative, visibility and invisibility, and shadow and light.

Barth’s latest series, ... and to draw a bright white line with light, debuts with this Art Institute exhibition. As with much of her earlier work, the domestic setting continues to be fertile ground for nuanced explorations of changes in atmosphere, although for the first time the artist has intervened in the scene she previously had only observed.

In this new series, Barth transforms a simple observation—the dance of a ribbon of light across curtains—into a complex photographic experience describing perception and the passage of time. The word “photograph” translates as drawing or writing with light; Barth’s new images, then, are quite literally photographs. This newest work is contextualized in the exhibition with select examples from white blind (bright red) and Sundial that have furthered her investigations into perception and light.

Uta Barth is an artist whose evocative, abstract photographs explore the nature of vision and the difference between how a human sees reality and how a camera records it. In contrast to documentary and confessional modes of photography, Barth intentionally depicts mundane or incidental objects in nondescript surroundings in order to focus attention on the fundamental act of looking and the process of perception. In white blind (bright red) (2002), she investigates both literal and metaphorical modes of perception in ghostly compositions that mimic the afterimages that persist in one’s visual memory after turning away from an object. Her recent series, …and to draw a bright, white line with light (2011), marks the first time Barth has intervened in the staging of her photographs. By manipulating curtains in her home, she created lines and curves of light that expand from a sliver to a wide ribbon across a sequence of large-scale, dramatically cropped images that evoke the subtle passage of time while also highlighting the visceral and intellectual pleasures of seeing. As Barth continues to expand her photographic practice to probe the theme of perception in new and inventive ways, she is encouraging viewers to reconsider the traditional functions and expectations of the photographic image.