Uta Barth

Born in Berlin in 1958 and now based in Los Angeles, Uta Barth is among the most influential artists working with photography to have emerged in the last decade. Her photographs take the complete opposite approach to the famous Dusseldorf school of photographers which include Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. While they record their subjects in sharply objective archival detail, Barth's images of interiors, buildings, suburban roads or natural environments are often out of focus, perversely cropped and apparently empty of any foreground subject. Yet what emerges from this reduction and abstraction of subject matter is a body of photographs of extraordinary, haunting beauty, evocative of great moments in the history of painting, from Vermeer to Whistler, or of a cinematic ambience such as the fume-laden neon haze of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.