Barbara Kasten’s Slippery Analog Photography, by Harry Swartz-Turfle, August 2015
PHILADELPHIA — Talking about the limitations of photography, painter David Hockney said that art “must deeply involve an observer whose body somehow has to be brought back in.” At the time, he was pessimistic about the medium’s possibilities.
Enter Barbara Kasten.
Kasten’s work looks like it’s from the desktop of a 21st-century new media artist, but she has been working for decades in the actual physical spaces of traditional photography. Instead of engaging with mass media and digital manipulation, her work is concerned with observing spaces, perspective, and light. In many ways it’s about bringing our bodies into the perception of spaces.