While researching Uta Barth, I learned a lot about her style and her thought process and I found it very inspiring. Through her photos, which she generally shoots out of focus and blurry, she abstracts otherwise everyday sights and turns them into a feeling. Her photos are often heavy in color and direction, promoting “unmotivated looking.” She has been quoted saying that she wants her viewers to be “looking at without looking for.” Her photos also often portray a feeling of “optical fatigue” or “staring into space.” Her work was really something that stood out to me, it was something I’d never seen before. When emulating her work, and taking photos in her style, it seemed like an easy enough task, but it proved to be not as easy as it looked. You’d think that all you’d have to do is take a photo out of focus, but in practice, I found that there’s a lot more thought to it than that. You have to consider direction and color, and how things will look out of focus, whether or not they can still be interesting, and not to mention figuring out how to get the perfect Uta Barth camera blur.
Below are some examples of Barth's photos that inspired me the most, including works from her series "...in passing 1995-1997," "nowhere near 1999," and "Ground 1994-1997."
Below is a contact sheet of all the photos taken for this project:
