lastnight i went to see uta barth give a lecture at risd.
she has been one of my favorite photographers for about a decade & a half now & i’ve realized that she is working with ideas that are quite similar to my thesis work thus far.
in her ground series, she investigates what she calls “non spaces” which in this case is the background that is so often visually disregarded in portraiture. with the camera lens, as with our eyes but it’s often too subtle to note, when we choose to focus on one thing all else slips out of focus. Barth set up her shots with the focus on the person in foreground & then simply removed the person so that all that is left in her images is the blurred background; a non space becoming the subject of the piece.
she is too good.
in much of her work, she cleverly tricks her viewer into looking at things with heightened sensitivity. In another series, she repeats the same image of a tree through a window taken at different times of day or in slightly different conditions over & over & over until the repetition forces the viewer to realize that the work is not about the tree but in fact about the need to be in the moment; to be invested in actually looking at the things that have become so familiar that you almost no longer see them.
i {heart} uta barth.
big time.