An artist I researched last semester has remained an influence in my work with photography and perhaps also film. I played with the focus of some of my tea bags with Uta Barth in mind and her conceptual underpinnings of perception and the ephemeral.I was hoping that by creating some tea bags with clearer representation and others more abstract this would cause the viewer to think about their own perception of memory. In addition the beauty of Uta Barth's photographs makes the everyday and mundane special and I found that looking through the family photographs this sensibility was heightened for me perhaps due to the loss.
Uta Barth – interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxYcpPDq5iQ
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'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
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