I am Not This Body: The Pinhole Photographs of Barbara Ess [Hardcover]

Guy Armstrong (Author), Michael Cunningham (Author), Thurston Moore (Author), Barbara Ess (Photographer)

Book Description

Series: Aperture Monograph | Publication Date: June 15, 2005

"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

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'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.

Editorial Reviews

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Aperture; 1 edition (June 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0893819360
• ISBN-13: 978-0893819361
• Product Dimensions: 12.1 x 9.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,674,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dreamy Inspiration, March 25, 2002

By 

tony vadakan (San Francisco, CA.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I am Not This Body: The Pinhole Photographs of Barbara Ess (Hardcover)

Dream-like, mysterious, haunting,......but at the same time these images by Barbara Ess evoke a deja vu feeling in me. It's as if I've experienced these images myself....are these my own memories or dreams displayed on the pages? well, this book certainly makes me want to get hold of a pinhole camera to achieve at least technically (hopefully) some of the visual qualities of these dreamy images. Leave those books of Yosemite on the bookstore shelves (more than enough have been consumed) and pick up a copy of I AM NOT THIS BODY to get a taste of the artistic and subconscious-evoking possibilities of photography.

10 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars ...and i am not this jaded, January 23, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: I am Not This Body: The Pinhole Photographs of Barbara Ess (Hardcover)

I've never owned a book of professional photography but was inspired by the reviewer notes to buy this online without a preview. I can honestly say that if i had been able to open the pages and experience the images even briefly--i wouldn't have purchased the collection. Yes, the psychological interiour is filled with murky matter and we are bound to witness it and some are gifted at illuminating it, but there was no heart revelation in this work for me. It just kind of felt ragged out and sloppy. No, we don't need another book of glossy yosemite postcards, but for thirty bucks and all the accolades i expected more of a transformative experience and less "event-bam". But hey, the snake on the den floor was cool.