UTA BARTH

Jan Tumlir writes, “As steadfast as this line of division between Figure and Ground might seemon paper, it quickly turns porous in actual practice. In Barth’s work, we are always looking forsome sort of synthesis between these two poles that nevertheless holds them in tension. A figureappears against its ground when conceived as just a background, but if we add to it the qualitiesof surface and support, then this also is the place of the figure’s medial grounding, and thusfundamentally indistinguishable from it. And, reciprocally, it could be argued that even in thosepictures where no figure encroaches upon the field of vision, the ground nevertheless remainssuffused with it. Those hands and feet that, here and there, reach into the picture from the edgesof the frame serve to remind us that a person is always there, even when wholly invisible. Thephotograph records the presence of the photographer on the scene; this witness who once stoodbefore it, now lurks behind it – a haunting figure.”

For the past twenty years, Uta Barth (b. 1958) has made visual perception the primary subject ofher photographic work. Barth first gained critical acclaim in the 1990s for her Ground and Fieldseries, in which she turned her attention to the information contained in a photograph’s oftenforgotten and peripheral background. Emptying images from what would often be considered atraditional subject matter or narrative, Barth makes the viewer aware of the phenomenologicalexperience of perceiving. The question of how we perceive – versus what we see – differentiatesBarth from the dominant trajectory of photography that is tied up with pointing at things in theworld and in which subject and content are mostly one and the same thing. Making the “thechoice of no choice”, Barth has confined her practice to the ambient, incidental, and ephemeral.