Customer Reviews

Uta Barth In Between Places

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An absolutely astonishing book, "In Bewteen Places" is the record of the exhibition of Barth's work on display in Seattle's Henry Art Gallery, as well as a very thorough record of her development over the last ten years. Her elegant, unsettling, serene, engaging images are shown here in full plates as well as details, many of which are interspersed throughout the book's excellent critical commentary. The criticism is well-reasoned and intelligent, but the images themselves are ravishing. I own two of her photographs, and the reproductions here are superb. At a time when art books in general, and photography books in particular, are expensive exercises in self-indulgence that are often ludicrous puff-piece advertisements for the galleries that sell the work, this book is a shining exception. It's truly worth the cost, and I highly recommend it.

Uta Barth: In Between Places is a visually poetic catalogue produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in 2000. It is a stand alone work of art and a revealing reference about the artist. Containing a wealth of philosophical and methodological material, the questions Barth and the authors raise about her work persist beyond a one-time glance or read through.

If you are unfamiliar with Barth's work, the opening paragraph written by Curator Sheryl Conkelton provides an illuminating summary of Barth's progression and an examination of the formal conventions of image making in general. The three essays, authored by curators Sheryl Conkelton, Russell Ferguson and Timothy Martin compliment Barth's photographs by exploring perception as an active concept. Barth's artistic investigation is a visual equivalent to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) which expands upon the idea of awareness as an embodied intentionality whereby meaning is assigned to experience.

Viewing Barth's out of focus images requires an active engagement with vision. Ground #30 (1994) from her Ground series is a painterly monochromatic image with hints of light and shadow that merely suggest a room's corner with a window. The blurred familiar prompts a self-reflective inquiry into the experiential mundane. This participation in the act of viewing begins to create a relationship between self as subject and self as object. The empty, nearly abstract views quietly compel closer examination. There is a seductive solitude in the barely recognizable. Barth fuses this quality of silence with consciousness in order to return us to our own vision.

I bought this book for a research paper I had to write and all I can say is wow! I would look through it again and again in amazement at the soft focus photographs of a photo lacking a subject with blurred backgrounds. In my research paper I argued that you can not have a truely subjectless photograph because as long as there is visual information that engages the viewers eye there will be a subject because to define a photographic subject: it is whatever is in the photograph that engages the eye the most.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves photography, the prints inside the book are of high quality and the interview within the book is just as exciting as the photographs themselves.

At the risk of repeating what has already been said: this is a deeply intellectual and beautiful work by a significant artist. Ms. Barth presents a disciplined and challenging oeuvre. The prints are in color and the aesthetic rush is immediate. One should view Barth's work in a gallery, if only for the totality of the experience. The sheer size of her work; the impact of her triptychs and so forth, cannot be contained within the pages of a book. This book, however, successfully displays the painterly sensitivity that Barth brings to her camera work.

The deeply evocative photography of Uta Barth finds its match in this most excellent publication. Barth's imagery, purposefully blurred though it may be, is beautifully presented in this book, which is perfect in its scale and balance between word and image (kudos to the designer.) Three texts round out the mix: Russell Ferguson's take is, as always, critically incisive and highly engaging and Timothy Martin's reading is downright poetic (he writes about her work in terms of perception and phenomenology -- very convincing.) I also appreciated the interview with this very mysterious artist -- it really helped me gain insight into her practice. As for the price: art books with good production values, good work and good essays are hard to find. This one is well worth it.