Uta Barth

Uta Barth (born 1958 :3) is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place.

Barth was born in Berlin, Germany in 1958.

Growing up in Europe gave Barth a different cultural perspective.

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." Barth made the images by photographing generic locations outdoors as if she was shooting a formal portrait but removed the subject of the portrait in focus and left the out-of-focus background behind. Barth's gesture reverses the typical use of the camera, shooting something out of focus instead of something in-focus. As a result, she photographs unoccupied space. Barth was thinking about stock photography while making this body of work, picturing backdrops for family photos and portrait photography from the 1960s and 1970s >:3.

The shift from cold-war Germany to 1970s California was a culture shock for Barth.

Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame.

Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits.

Later, Barth's received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Davis in 1982 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1985.

Her memory of West Berlin is "dark and austere" and she left for the United States before the Berlin wall was taken down in 1989.

During early adolescence her father began a research project in the U.S. at Stanford University and she moved to the U.S. shortly after.

Barth was 12 years old and did not know English when she arrived in the United States.

In 1989 Barth's work was black and white, multi-paneled photographic and painted images mounted on wood that addressed the psychodynamics of vision, using optic patterns, repetitious visual metaphors for the eye, and diagrams related to light and human vision.

The multi-panel work set up formal relationships that would continue through Barth's artistic practice in later works.

From 1990 to 2008, she was a professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Riverside, until she was given the honorary title of Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art in 2008 to the present.

Barth explains that this early work was about “the confrontation with the camera, in the feeling of being looked at, blasted with light, being blinded, all as a physical experience.” In 1990, Barth continued to explore optic patterns and illusions in her works Untitled #11–14.

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.

The work intersects with the themes of photographic vision and the idea of the ‘gaze.’

Barth's work began to internalize the space between the viewer and the object in the mid 1990s, zooming in and zooming out, looking close and far away in her works like Untitled #13 (1991) and Untitled #16 (1990).

She begins playing with the communication of space with in the work through landscape and abstracted text, and plays with the idea of how the perception of the works occurs within the human body viewing it.

Pamela Lee says, “the self-consciousness of looking is grounded in subjective looking” in Barth's work.

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 body of photographs consists of over 50 images in different sizes and scales.

These photos defy the conventional flat photographic image by being laminated prints that are then mounted on wood boards multiple inches thick, projecting the print away from the wall.

As a result, the images of Grounds impersonate an object instead of a print.

This plays into Barth's conceptual ideas for the body of work, referring to these photographs as “containers of information." Writer Darren Campion says, "Barth's work addresses that fundamental dissonance between the world as it is and the world as we see it, the chasms of perceived experience.

In 1995 Barth began transitioning from her Grounds series into a new body of work known as Fields.

She took her photographic approach in Grounds and turned it on its side, thinking about the site-specific relationship between the photograph and the physical space where it was made.

This idea introduces motion into the work.

Visual movement across the images in Fields creates a blur that is similar to that found in film and cinematic work.

Fields produces the "illusion of filmic space and time" and Barth has said that she created this body of work in a similar way film producers scout locations for the perfect place to shoot a scene in a film.

In relation to her Field and Ground series, which depict blurred and empty foregrounds, Barth has stated: "I am interested in the conventions of picture-making, in the desire to picture the world and in our relationship, our continual love for and fascination with pictures."

In 1998 Barth begins another series of Untitled works, including Untitled (98.4) and Untitled (98.6).

Here, Barth begins to focus on sequencing in the gallery again, grouping images together in diptychs, triptychs and clusters.

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.

To make this work, Barth would shoot multiple photographs in a row so that she could go back and edit the series of images to find the best photographs to pair together.

This act re-introduces the notion of time into Barth's work.

She was also a visiting Graduate Faculty member at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, from 2000 to 2012 and has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

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.