Imagine you’re taking a picture of a friend. You’ve got him leaning casually against a wall by a doorway, with the light coming from behind and across your shoulder to illuminate the scene in front of your camera. He’s in sharp focus, all crisply articulated detail, while everything in front of and behind him in the picture falls off into fuzzed obscurity. Click! The picture is taken.
Now, imagine exactly the same scenario, only this time your friend leaves the scene just before the shutter clicks. The foreground and background remain blurred and out of focus, while the focal plane in the middle ground is no longer occupied by flesh and blood. Space, whose emptiness is filled only with an ephemeral plenitude of light, becomes the strangely enigmatic subject of the photograph.
Uta Barth began to imagine this unusual, second scheme in 1992. The richly evocative results have been explored by the 37-year-old, Los Angeles-based artist ever since. Seventeen of her photographs are now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in a lovely exhibition organized by Elizabeth A. T. Smith that is--ironically enough--part of the Focus Series at the museum.
