Uta Barth (born 1958 :3)[1] is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place.
Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground"[2] in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame.
This work includes four small photographs of houses that are encompassed in large fields of black and white strips, similar to that of static on a television screen and creates an optic vibration.
In Untitled #13, Barth includes a photograph of a landscape whose details are blurred to slow down the immediate understanding of the image by the audience.
This effect describes the instability of one's visual field of vision, and becomes the basis for Barth's next series of works Grounds.
This is extended to other areas of the photographic process as well – the main correlate of space being, of course, time, and its fluidity, which seems antithetical to our notion of what photography does.
Visual movement across the images in Fields creates a blur that is similar to that found in film and cinematic work.
The work plays on the idea of multiple points of view or the experience of a visual double-take where a detail catches the viewer long enough to take a second image, a second look.
She begins spacing her panels of images on the wall in intervals to show gaps in time between shooting the photographs.
[9] She made hundreds of images that contain moments of framing, records the ebb and flow of light and captures the change of the seasons.
She deliberately sequences images, pairing anywhere from two, six or a dozen photographs of bare tree branches with white sky backdrops together.
[2] "A flickering of visual consciousness," Holly Myers,[10][11] an art critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote in reference to the work.
"Perhaps I have just discovered a way to make marks with light that fits into my ongoing practice," Barth's explains about the series in an interview with Art in America.
[13] …and to draw a bright white line with light was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago May 14–August 16, 2011,[14] as well as at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York in October–December 2011.
The press release[16] for the show gave a brief description of the each artists goals for their work, including Barth who planned to create a series of multi-panel photographs capturing variations of a single view of the interior of her home.
In an interview with the artists in the show, Barth's says, “The window is a wonderful vehicle for referring to the act of looking.”[9] The exhibition displayed the contemporary artists work alongside art historical works like French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce who took the world's first photograph in 1826.