Uta Barth's work induces the viewer to become aware of his or her capacity to really look at something and refers back to the minimalist tradition, which proposes that a viewer relocates her or his self in relation to the object and its space.

In this interview with Sheryl Conkelton in the Journal of Contemporary Art Uta Barth says the following whilst talking about her work:

On the most obvious level, we all expect photographs to be pictures of something. We assume that the photographer observed a place, a person, an event in the world and wanted to record it, point at it. There is always something that motivated the taking of a photograph. The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense, they register only that which is incidental and peripheral implied. Instead, there are some clues to indicate that what we are looking at is the surrounding information. (The images lack focus because the camera's attention is somewhere else. Many of the compositions, while clearly deliberate and carefully arranged in relation to the picture's edge, are awkward, off balance and formally suggest a missing element.) Slowly it becomes clear that what we are presented with is a sort of empty container and it is at that point that people begin to "project" into this space. It begins to read as an empty screen.