Uta Barth

Uta Barth

Uta Barth was born in 1958, Berlin. She is a contemporary photographer who lives and works in LA. Barth focused her photography with her projects. She experimented with depth of the field, focus, and framing. She used these techniques to take pictures that are more suggestive than descriptive. Her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual responses. Her images of interiors, buildings, suburban roads and natural environments are often out of focus, cropped and apparently empty of any foreground subject.

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 Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She was awarded $50,000 grant by United States Artists for a public charity that supports and promotes the works of American Photographers. Her photography questions the traditional functions of pictures and people's expectations of them. By taking pictures of ordinary anonymous places, Barth uses what is natural and unstudied to shift attention away from the subject matter, and redirect focus to the processes of perception and intellectual pleasures of photography. Her pictures usually consist of in simple rooms, city streets, airports and fields.

Barth provides a compelling look at the nature of anyone's own experience. She nicely composes photographs, most often created in places that seem familiar. She focuses her camera on unoccupied foregrounds in simple interiors. She also shifts from still photography to that of film, experimenting cinematic effects. Barth has even worked in her own house, recording sequences of light through windows and across floors and walls to create pictures that show undirected observation.

Each body of work explores different details of surroundings, such as the corner of a room, the headlights of a passing car, or bare...