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I am Not This Body: The Pinhole Photographs of Barbara Ess
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About I Am Not This Body: The Pinhole Photographs Of
Product Description Barbara Ess makes subtly-toned photographs that are not so much reality as visionary versions of it. Blurry and distorted, they seem to coax their subjects from mysterious spaces. --Grace Glueck, The New York Times “Ess' images often have a dreamy subterranean quality--part wonder and part menace--as if culled directly from the subconscious.” --Gregory Volk, ARTnews I Am Not This Body investigates primary, personal experience and relies upon the viewer's imagination and memories. Barbara Ess is renowned for her accomplished use of the pinhole camera and her effort to “photograph what cannot be photographed.” Ess' is a conscious quest to explore what she calls “ambiguous perceptual boundaries: between people, between the self and the not self, between in here and out there.” In her view, “reality... includes a perceiver, who has memories, thoughts, desires, emotions--[which] a normal camera tends to omit.” The strange and affecting images she coaxes from this primitive camera manage to evoke the sublime and the impossible, the textures of desire and loss. From Library Journal This first major overview of Ess's photographic work, which also features supplemental drawings, video stills, and photographs of the artist's performances, highlights her stunning use of the pinhole camera. Large sections of uninterrupted full-page reproductions, many of which utilize brilliant hues of light and blurred images to create an otherworldly effect, capture simple frame houses, waterfalls, naked thighs, couples kissing, animals feeding, a snake in a living room, and other details of domestic and wild life. Even the images of the natural world seem to have a psychological component, which is brought to the fore in her video and performance work, as illustrated at the end of the book. In brief personal essays, writer Cunningham discusses science and the exploratory nature of Ess's art, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore talks about Ess's participation in New York's punk/no-wave music scene, and meditation teacher Guy Armstrong takes on the topic of perception in Ess's work. The writing by Ess herself is impressionistic, complementing the work if not explaining it. A short interview and extensive bibliography highlight the depth of her career. Recommended for all art photography collections. Carolyn Kuebler, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Review "Barbara Ess makes subtly-toned photographs that are not so much reality as visionary versions of it. Blurry and distorted, they seem to coax their subjects from mysterious spaces." --Grace Glueck, The New York Times "Ess's images often have a dreamy subterranean quality--part wonder and part menace--as if culled directly from the subconscious." --Gregory Volk, ARTnews "Ess works in a gap between the out-there of the world and the in-here of the mind, not to heal the gap but, for truth's sake, precisely to widen it. She thereby establishes a zone congenial to honest speculations of intelligence and to test-firings of the heat-seeking missile of the heart." --Peter Schjeldahl, The Village Voice -- Review "Her camera is a skeptical eye, surveying domestic scenes, finding them just a bit discomfiting, her camera is a wide eye, gawking at a couple locked in embrace on an empty beach. It is a wandering eye, attempting to understand the wistful and transient beauty of the natural world. In Ess's world, eye and I are one and the same." --Black & White Magazine About the Author Over the past two decades, Barbara Ess has been represented in numerous exhibitions, including a large retrospective of her work at the Queens Museum in 1993. She also works with video and installation.
