Uta Barth's (1958 – ) work made me want to be a photographer when I was beginning college, and while she comes much later than Laura Gilpin in the history of photography, I think their work pairs well together. Her conceptual grappling with light, perception, and the optics of the camera remind me of Descartes's La Dioptrique (1637) in which he describes the nature of light and seeing. These two together reinforce the eternal resonance of the mysteries of light and sight:
You have only to consider that the differences which a blind man notes among trees, rocks, water, and similar things through the medium of his stick do not seem less to him than those among red, yellow, green, and all the other colors seem to us; and that nevertheless these differences are nothing other, in all these bodies, than the diverse ways of moving, or of resisting the movements of, this stick.