Carly Beyer- Style
Barbara Ess
Barbara Ess is famous for her unique use of the pinhole
camera, and her effort to "photograph what cannot be photographed."
Her haunting images describe a mysterious world of seemingly ordinary surfaces
where everyday objects are shown erratically. Ess shows a conscious effort to
explore what she calls "ambiguous perceptual boundaries: between people,
between the self and the not self, between in here and out there." Using a
simple cardboard camera with no lens and a minute aperture, Ess creates
unsettling, very evocative photographs. Barbara Ess was born in Brooklyn and
received a BA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969
and attended the London School of Film Technique in London in 1971. She has been
exhibited widely throughout the world and her works belong to numerous
collections. Barbara Ess lives and works in New York. Because of the limited
available light and short depth of field, her photos are always dark and misty,
often silhouetted around the sides. Everything is slightly out of focus except
for the very center of the subject. The photographs are made on black-and-white
negatives and printed on colored papers; whose tones become nuanced by the
minimal light afforded by the camera. Ess focuses less on technique rather than
on the unique subject matter, such as a dog’s front legs. The extremely limited
field of vision creates a dreamlike print in which she explores the ambiguous
perceptual boundaries in typically intimate compositions.
Barbara Ess 1948
My Photographs
First Five Printed











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