Uta Barth’s Atmospheric Photographs

The German-American artist on her unique approach to making art

Uta Barth’s Atmospheric Photographs

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Blurry image of a warm white wall in front of another wall with a bit of light wood floor also visible on the right.

Ground #58, 1994, Uta Barth. Laminated inkjet print, 9 1/2 × 12 × 1 3/4 in. Getty Museum, 2016.39 © Uta Barth

By James Cuno

Jul 20, 2022 25:46 min

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“The camera sort of teaches you to see in a really different way and to experience your environment in a different way, and to pay attention to the act of looking.”

Photographer Uta Barth’s photographs focus on the act of looking. She has long been interested in creating images in which there is no discernible subject, but rather the image or light itself is the subject. Barth’s conceptual photographs examine how we see and how we define foreground and background. Her series are often long-term engagements; she photographs the same place over many months, or even years, to understand how light changes a space over time. She recently completed a series at the Getty Center taken over the course of a year and comprising over 60,000 images. Barth has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.

In this episode, Barth discusses her approach to making images through several of her bodies of work including Ground, Figure, and her new Getty series. Her career will be the subject of a retrospective at the Getty Center in fall 2022.

More to explore:

Uta Barth website

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