The Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, Uta Barth, is best known for pushing the boundaries of color photography and crafting pictures that capture the nuances of place through poetic abstraction. The artist’s work from the late 1990s, including this diptych, elaborates her conceptual interests in peripheral information and perception and marks her first exploration into serial shifts through multiple panels—here, sighting the same location from slightly different perspectives. Barth says that, contrary to her approach, “most photographers use the camera as a pointing device and in most photographs the subject and the content are one and the same thing.” Instead, her work investigates perception and attempts through light, color, environment, and various modes of abstraction to force viewer awareness in unexpected directions.

This work is currently on view in the Lober Viewing Alcove on the second floor of the museum.

Lisa Fischman,
Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis.