MATTHEW HIGGS

Uta Barth is among the key recent artists who have brought photography to the prominent position once occupied by painting. Her photographs of interiors, urban and natural environments capture fleeting moments as if seen out of the corner of the eye, where we become aware of the beauty of everyday light, space, texture and luminous surfaces. Working in broad series, each body of work explores different details of our surroundings, such as the corner of a room (Ground #38, 1994); the headlights of a passing car (Field #3, 1995); bare trees seen through a window (white blind [bright red], 2002). Like a kind of ‘portrait photography, but with the sitter removed’, Barth’s work focuses not on the subject of the photograph itself, but the subtle play of light and shade on planes and surfaces: that is, the phenomena of vision itself. Often one element, such as a few leaves on a branch, is brought into focus while all else is dissolved and diffused, suggesting the atmospheric painters of the past, from Vermeer to Turner, or suggesting the background ambiences in film. Barth has been included in such major group exhibitions as ‘New photography 11’, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995); ‘Ten Artists, Ten Images’, Tate Modern, London (2000); ‘Visions of America’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002); and ‘Moving Pictures’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and tour.