Uta Barth: A Career-Spanning Survey of Uta Barth’s Rigorous, Seductive Photographs

Catherine Wagley, Photograph, January 3, 2023
Uta Barth spent a full year photographing one relatively nondescript corner of architect Richard Meier’s Getty Center. The Getty had commissioned her to make work celebrating the 25th anniversary of its hilltop Southern California complex, and she had opted for rigor and repetition: twice a month between 2019 and 2020, she set up cameras outside the entrance to the Harold M. Williams auditorium. Every five minutes, all day long – the series is titled from dawn to dusk – she recorded the same view: a glass side door, situated to the left of a corridor. The view is vaguely familiar to anyone who has visited the museum complex, but instead of capturing its ambitious vistas, the photographs bore into the glaring whiteness of Meier’s travertine surfaces. Some images zoom even further in, past the door, so that just four squares of travertine fill the entire frame (as critic William Poundstone suggested, the square shapes and sizes of Barth’s finished images appear to mimic the tiles that comprise the Getty’s exterior). As the light changes over the course of the day, shadows and glows define these shifts. A few bright red images conjure an afterimage, or what you would see upon closing your eyes after gazing too long at the sun-bathed tiles. But the scene itself rarely changes. The door stays closed, and the corridor uninhabited, though in a couple of photographs, a long orange extension cord hints at human activity.