Uta Barth: The Long Now
"This year (2010), I moved from the studio I had worked in for 18 years into a space that I am slowly making my new home. Boxes. Everywhere there are boxes not seen for 30 years and completely forgotten. Recently I opened a box or two and found images I had made sometime between 1979 and 1982, during my undergraduate years and my first months of graduate school. I had never shown these images in class and didn't even hang them up in my studio. They were simply made, printed and packed away; I had no language for them, no way to think about them that I could understand at the time.Yet there are so many of them. I look at them now and am touched by how closely they are tied to the work in this book. They track time, they trace light--piles of prints composed around empty centers, images of nothing, just empty grounds, walls and fields and sky. If information was present, it was only a sliver pushed to the edge of an empty field. I had completely forgotten this work. Now I love finding it and learning that what I aim for in my work today was present long before I could name it."Uta Barth, excerpted from The Long Now.