Uta Barth: Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

By Lyra Kilston

This past year, Uta Barth moved for the first time in 18 years. While packing up and leafing through her possessions, she came across some photographs she had never shown, and in fact had completely forgotten about. Made between 1979 and 1982, during her last year of college and her first months in graduate school at University of California, Los Angeles, the small black-and-white images were displayed in the gallery’s bottom floor rooms. The images included studies of a ribbon of sunlight gleaming beneath a heavy curtain, shadows of legs in a rectangle of light, portraits of the artist with three-fourths of her body in shadow and then in brightness, empty chairs, a field of snow with just a few naked twigs, and a series of banal objects (a newspaper, wires, a ladder) moved around a room. Barth stated, in the gallery’s accompanying monograph, that she was deeply pleased to discover that the elements she has ardently pursued in her work – tracking time, tracing light, vacant centres, minimal and peripheral content – were present nearly 30 years ago. This show, with older, forgotten work on the first floor and a new series upstairs, presents the bookends to a remarkably consistent, and distilled practice.

Uta Barth, Untitled #3, 1979–82/2010, inkjet print, 23 x 29 cm. Courtesy 1301PE, Los Angeles

In the past few decades, Barth has become known for contemplative photographs of domestic scenes devoid of action, let alone humans. Golden slices of sunlight spill neatly onto floors and furniture embodying the serenity of late afternoons spent watching the room slowly change, while her studies of flowers and branches in vases hum with a reverence for the simple beauty found in observing the everyday. Barth has long followed the Zen notion of what she calls a ‘choice of no choice’: she refrains from intentionally seeking out photographic subjects and instead turns her camera towards what is already around her – the sundial of her home. Through this disciplined practice, her work highlights the act of seeing as an autonomous undertaking. She does not seek out things in order to make a photograph, she makes photographs of what she happens to see.

Uta Barth, Untitled #5, 1979–82/2010, inkjet print, 23 x 29 cm. Courtesy 1301PE, Los Angeles

Upstairs were diptychs, and one triptych, of tree branches twinned with the artist’s shadow cast across a street or sidewalk. This signals a significant departure from the past ten years of Barth’s working solely inside (a confinement that conjures another housebound creative mind, Emily Dickinson, who was also captivated by ‘a certain slant of light’ in which ‘shadows hold their breath’). Barth wandered outside and pointed her camera up, and then down. Sometimes the artist’s feet are visible along with the two long shadows of her legs cast against the grain of asphalt-dark lines creating angles as they cross sidewalk cracks or the dividing paint on a street. The tree branches are all set against a stark white sky, photographed so that only the centre of the image is in focus, the rest of the splintering branches, leaves or berries blurring into near abstraction. The result is a surreal, almost artificially constructed version of the branches, reminiscent of JoAnn Verburg’s uncanny portraits of olive trees. Occasionally Barth takes further liberties with representation, as in two prints where the negative images of her legs’ shadows throw chalky white lines across the darkened pavement, a reminder that we are looking at an imprint of light, not the world.

Uta Barth, Untitled, 2010, mounted colour photographs, 2 panels, 105 x 82 cm, 105 x 118 cm. Courtesy 1301PE, Los Angeles

The title of this show, appropriately, is another Zen koan made popular among the art crowd by Lawrence Weschler’s brilliant book about Robert Irwin. (Both Irwin and Barth also share a debt to the local light, so raucously present here.) Barth described her recent perambulations outside as without destination, aimed only at seeing – thus we never look straight ahead, but only at what light and shadow are doing above and below the artist’s body. For more than 30 years Barth has stayed true to a pursuit of perception, each portrait capturing time, light and, yes, even being with exquisite grace.

Uta Barth, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, was on view at 1301PE, Los Angeles, from 1 May to 2 July