Uta Barth – interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxYcpPDq5iQ
Barth states that her work is different to
other photographers in that usually the subject matter and the content are one
and the same whereas her work is ‘mainly about perception’.
She states that her aim is to make the
viewer aware of his/her ‘own perceptual process and relationship to what is
hanging on the wall’. At art school she became fascinated by the realization
that what she saw through the viewfinder and what came out in the darkroom were
2 different things and that ‘the camera was teaching her to see’.
Barth has shot in her own home for 14 years
exploring this interest in ‘light, perception and the mundane, fleeting,
ephemereal, everyday information’ realizing that she didn’t need to go
elsewhere to seek this subject matter.
Uta Barth
... and to draw a bright white
line with light (Untitled 11.9)
2011
inkjet print in artist’s frame
37 1/2 x 55
3/4 inches; 95.3 x 141.6 cm
Edition of 6; 2 Aps
Uta Barth's
hazy photographs occupy the territory between abstraction and representation.
Their lack of focus has become something of the artist's signature, and it
often elicits comparisons between her work and that of such early-20th-century
pictorialists as Gertrude Käsebier and Edward Steichen. In some regards this
association is apt, especially when one considers the matte surfaces and heavy
wooden backing of some of Barth's photographs, which emphasize their presence
as objects. Moreover, as in pictorialist work, light evanescently illuminates
many of Barth's scenes and subjects. For the most part, though, the fuzzy glow
of her pictures far exceeds that of her predecessors' photographs. Barth
renders landscapes and everyday spaces all but illegible by employing an
extremely shallow depth of field. In doing so, she ruptures the age-old
emphasis in photography on the referent and instead turns her audience toward
its own experiences.
As early as her series Field and Ground
(both 1994–97), Barth began moving toward an emphasis on pure surface; often
only the occasional detail could clue viewers into what they were seeing. In
her series nowhere near (1999), she offers a clearly rendered object: the panes
of her living-room windows, through which she shoots the surrounding landscape.
Yet windows exist not to be seen, but to be seen through. In focusing her lens
on the glass itself rather than the view behind it, Barth highlights the
conceptual underpinnings of all her work: an examination of the act of
perception. When she enlarges some photographs to epic proportions and arranges
them in diptychs or triptychs, Barth effectively overwhelms viewers with an
acute awareness of their own processes of seeing, very often by confounding
their understanding of what it is they see. In their banal beauty, her
photographs hold a mirror up to the limits of perception itself.
Sourced from 2014, no author, The Solomon
Guggenheim foundation
What is also very interesting is that Barth
intervenes in the scene to create the visual effects that she desires such as
drawing the curtains etc – like how I m intervening by creating and using
different filters in front of the lens- this is so amazing its related also to
this idea of perception and how we see life and the mundane – through filters
of faith, mystery and a search for more or filters of mundanity, loneliness or
fear? Is the mundane truly mundane or can it co exist as an amazing holy moment
whereby the phenomena of light itself which creates the scene externally as
well within my camera is a pure unfathomable miracle in a sense and the result
of a ball of gases which are fusing and creating crazy outputs of heat and
light and that the sun is perfectly far away enough to sustain life on earth
and yet not to frizzle it. Is that like a metaphor for God – he s close enough:
visible through the white light that comes to our earth but to see the rainbow
colours of light somethings gotta bend – to make the invisible become visible….
Barth says that the light is ‘the medium
for this work’ – the light is drawing – the literal meaning of photography –
drawing with light ….she states that people walk out of the gallery seeing different
things ‘becoming attuned to life’.
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