New Book Provides Career Overview of Iconic LA–Based Artist Uta Barth

Los Angeles–based artist Uta Barth (b. 1958) has spent her decades-long career exploring the complexities and limits of human and mechanical vision.

At first glance, her photographs appear to be simple depictions of everyday objects and scenes—light filtering through a window, tree branches bereft of leaves, a sparsely appointed domestic interior—but these images, visually spare yet conceptually rigorous, emerge from her investigation of sight, perception, light, and time.

In Uta Barth: Peripheral Vision (J. Paul Getty Museum, $60), curator Arpad Kovacs and contributors Lucy Gallun and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe chart Barth’s career path and discuss her most significant series, revealing how she has rejected the primacy of traditional photographic subjects and instead calls attention to what is on the periphery. The book contains previously unpublished bodies of work made early in her career that add much to our understanding of this important artist. Also included is Barth’s most recent work, ...from dawn to dusk, an ambitious commission marking the 25th anniversary of the Getty Center.