Uta Barth

Uta Barth's hazy photographs occupy the territory between abstraction and representation. Their lack of focus has become something of the artist's signature, and it often elicits comparisons between her work and that of such early-20th-century pictorialists as Gertrude Käsebier and Edward Steichen. In some regards this association is apt, especially when one considers the matte surfaces and heavy wooden backing of some of Barth's photographs, which emphasize their presence as objects. Moreover, as in pictorialist work, light evanescently illuminates many of Barth's scenes and subjects. For the most part, though, the fuzzy glow of her pictures far exceeds that of her predecessors' photographs. Barth renders landscapes and everyday spaces all but illegible by employing an extremely shallow depth of field. In doing so, she ruptures the age-old emphasis in photography on the referent and instead turns her audience toward its own experiences. In their banal beauty, her photographs hold a mirror up to the limits of perception itself.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Field%20%2323&page=&f=Title&object=98.4629 

Often blurred or with only one element rendered sharply, clinging to the margin of the composition, Uta Barth's deceptively simple photographs of ordinary, ambiguous places are both elegant and challenging. Walls, windows, patches of light on a rug, the glow of an out-of-focus glance toward the horizon: all these provoke phenomenological reflections on perception and subjectivity, often suspending a viewer in the midst of the customary attempt to make sense of what is being seen, to reduce it to an accessible package of associations and meaning. "Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall," Barth has said. "This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an almost visceral, physical and personal sense."
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Uta_Barth_the_Long_Now.html?id=W5PPI9T_6RUC&redir_esc=y

... to walk without destination and to see only to see...

 http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artist.php?art_name=Uta%20Barth

I don’t want the work to be about me, so I carefully edit out autobiographical information. In 1998 I made a decision to only make photographs in my house because I wanted to find another way to empty the subject out of my images, to separate meaning and subject. Seeking something to photograph made no sense anymore, but I still had to point the camera somewhere, so I point it at what’s familiar and everyday that it’s almost invisible. I don’t want to become the subject I’ve tried so hard to erase.

By photographing what’s invisible to me, and repeating it endlessly, hopefully it becomes clear that something else might be happening other than describing my home. I point the camera at things I stare at day after day while talking on the phone, sitting around, or waking up. When editing negatives for a show, I take out anything with "stuff" in it, because it instantly grabs attention. Shoes on the floor, clothes, letters and objects on my desk immediately construct a narrative and identity of the person, and there you have it: I’m the subject. So, I diligently erase myself from the work.

                              http://db-artmag.com/archiv/2006/e/2/1/421.html