Uta Barth is a contemporary German photographer. Interested in the translation of photographic perception to human perception, Barth often chooses ethereal or elusive subject matter—such as white curtains interspersed by strains of sunlight—which, no matter the fidelity to the real world, becomes abstracted or distorted when seen as a photograph. “I keep trying to find ways to shift the viewer’s attention away from the object they are looking at and toward their own perceptual process,” she has explained. “How can I make you aware of your own activity of looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at?” Born on January 29, 1958,​ in Berlin, Germany, she moved to the United States as a teenager, going on to receive her MFA from the University of California Los Angeles. Barth was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.