Text by Jonathan Crary, Russell Ferguson, Holly Myers.
Often blurred or with only one element rendered sharply, clinging to the margin of the composition, Uta Barth's deceptively simple photographs of ordinary, ambiguous places are both elegant and challenging. Walls, windows, patches of light on a rug, the glow of an out-of-focus glance toward the horizon: all these provoke phenomenological reflections on perception and subjectivity, often suspending a viewer in the midst of the customary attempt to make sense of what is being seen, to reduce it to an accessible package of associations and meaning. "Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall," Barth has said. "This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an almost visceral, physical and personal sense." This comprehensive monographic volume presents a definitive overview of Barth's works, fully illustrated with more than 300 full-color reproductions, spanning from her earliest photographs to her most recent. New texts by Russell Ferguson, former Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Holly Myers, art critic and writer; and renowned scholar Jonathan Crary provide critical perspectives on the work of this visionary artist.
Born in Berlin in 1958, and now resident in Los Angeles, Uta Barth is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Tate in London. In 2007 Barth was named a Broad Art Foundation Fellow.
Featured image is from Uta Barth: The Long Now.
STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.
FROM THE BOOK
"This year (2010), I moved from the studio I had worked in for 18 years into a space that I am slowly making my new home. Boxes. Everywhere there are boxes not seen for 30 years and completely forgotten. Recently I opened a box or two and found images I had made sometime between 1979 and 1982, during my undergraduate years and my first months of graduate school. I had never shown these images in class and didn't even hang them up in my studio. They were simply made, printed and packed away; I had no language for them, no way to think about them that I could understand at the time. Yet there are so many of them. I look at them now and am touched by how closely they are tied to the work in this book. They track time, they trace light--piles of prints composed around empty centers, images of nothing, just empty grounds, walls and fields and sky. If information was present, it was only a sliver pushed to the edge of an empty field. I had completely forgotten this work. Now I love finding it and learning that what I aim for in my work today was present long before I could name it." Uta Barth, excerpted from The Long Now.
FORMAT: Hbk, 11.5 x 10 in. / 384 pgs / illustrated throughout / multiple gatefolds. LIST PRICE: U.S. $75.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $99 GBP £65.00 ISBN: 9780980024241 PUBLISHER: Gregory R. Miller & Co. AVAILABLE: 7/31/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.. Text by Jonathan Crary, Russell Ferguson, Holly Myers.
Often blurred or with only one element rendered sharply, clinging to the margin of the composition, Uta Barth's deceptively simple photographs of ordinary, ambiguous places are both elegant and challenging. Walls, windows, patches of light on a rug, the glow of an out-of-focus glance toward the horizon: all these provoke phenomenological reflections on perception and subjectivity, often suspending a viewer in the midst of the customary attempt to make sense of what is being seen, to reduce it to an accessible package of associations and meaning. "Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall," Barth has said. "This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an almost visceral, physical and personal sense." This comprehensive monographic volume presents a definitive overview of Barth's works, fully illustrated with more than 300 full-color reproductions, spanning from her earliest photographs to her most recent. New texts by Russell Ferguson, former Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Holly Myers, art critic and writer; and renowned scholar Jonathan Crary provide critical perspectives on the work of this visionary artist.
Born in Berlin in 1958, and now resident in Los Angeles, Uta Barth is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Tate in London. In 2007 Barth was named a Broad Art Foundation Fellow.
