For many years now I have been collecting pictures in which the background interests me, sometimes for purely formal and compositional reasons, at other times because [of] the type of location or subject matter or even some odd relationship that occurs between background and subject. Mostly I find them in newspapers and magazines and I cut and crop out the section of interest to me and pin it to my studio wall. I have never directly recreated or reproduced any of these found pictures, but have made images based on them. Recently I have become very interested in this collection of small clippings in and of themselves … Most of them include a small section of the figure that has been cut away. They have a shoulder, a hand or part of a face at the very edge, but because of the way I have cut them, the centre of the pictures, the place we are trained to look, is now empty.
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/86/aa/d2/86aad2e698a5fdc2c3138dc0608b8492.jpg)
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b6/7f/1d/b67f1da9d3cdb5a2fe4c9df727a005c6.jpg)
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/1f/44/be/1f44beb4d03f910c670a2db7e2e16c5e.jpg)
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ae/ec/85/aeec85ca370cddda749633da37f199a0.jpg)
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a2/f8/96/a2f8969e5f9baccbec63d90741533e30.jpg)
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/1e/41/8c/1e418c7ffae1ca42e4368407dd614553.jpg)
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cd/d5/62/cdd5624a9ce3a57cd957528f6b27075b.jpg)
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/d8/b9/7d/d8b97ddaac5d20751f0eb6d94a03242e.jpg)
![Uta Barth ‘[no title]’, 1995–7 © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY:](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/d5/a6/28/d5a628188cda9932cf5c17600a866b03.jpg)
