Barbara Ess: I Am Not This Body [Hardcover]

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.

"Ess makes subtly toned photographs that are not so much reality as visionary versions of it." -- Grace Glueck, The New York Times

A book of strange and affecting images that evoke both the sublime and the impossible.

I Am Not This Body investigates primary, personal experience and relies upon the viewer's imagination and memories. Barbara Ess is renowned for her uniquely accomplished use of the pinhole camera, and her effort to "photograph what cannot be photographed." Ess's 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.

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.