October 9-15, 2003
art
More Than Meets the Eye
 Barbara Ess, No Title (Broken Cup) (1988), 50 inches by 70 inches, color photograph.  |
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Barbara Ess' photographs employ simple methods but contain worlds of meaning.
Based on the ancient discovery of the camera obscura, the pinhole camera was invented in the 1850s. The camera can be built out of an ordinary box (a shoebox or oatmeal box, for example) that is sealed in a darkroom with a piece of unexposed film inside. The box is placed in front of the subject and pierced with a pin. Then the film is exposed, developed and printed. There is no lens in this process, and the resulting images have blurry contours, infinite depth of field, overexposed centers and darkening around the edges. Pinhole cameras were marketed in Victorian times as an easy-to-use process that emphasized pictorial and atmospheric effects. Now, although not widely used by professionals, pinhole cameras are often used to teach students about the basic principles of photography.
A selection of 22 pinhole photographs by New York artist Barbara Ess is now featured in the exhibition "I Am Not This Body" at Moore College of Art & Design. Ess began using this technique more than 20 years ago, exploiting its atmospheric effects in her disturbing but hauntingly beautiful photographs. Interestingly, Ess has a background in philosophy and experimental film. She says that the goal of all of her work is to explore the boundaries between the self and the world. She creates insubstantial, dreamlike images that seem to imply that what we call "the world" is really just a series of highly subjective interactions between the things around us and our senses. Drawing from ideas in phenomenology and Buddhism, she writes: "Who is the self having these thoughts and who is watching them? … There’s the experience and that’s all there is."
Ess’ subjects are mostly ordinary things, made extraordinary through the process of photography. 1998’s No Title (Sunflowers) reveals a hidden melancholy in a very ordinary scene. Here a clump of flowers, stalks and raggedy leaves is sharply silhouetted against the pale yellowish sky, while darkness pushes in around it. In No Title (Dog’s Feet), shot in 1985, the utter strangeness of a dog’s knobby front feet are highlighted by the surrounding brilliant red background. Another very large photograph, 1990’s No Title (Fish), shows a pile of large (dead?) fish juxtaposed against a miniature urban scene of tenements and fire escapes. The light is grayish-yellow, like dirty water. All of these ordinary things, as experienced and photographed by Ess, are imbued with a densely symbolic dimension.
Images of the human face and figure are made more transitory and disconcerting by Ess’ process. In No Title (Face in Landscape), from 2000, a girl stands in a field with a border of trees and patchy clouds above. She has the look of a pre-Raphaelite ghost as she fades into the margin of the circular image. Made from a horizontal band of 14 contact prints of 4-by-5 film, 1998’s No Title (Line of Girls with Dress) has the humor of a twisted fairy tale. Here, nearly identical images of female figures hold their glowing dresses, lit from within by Christmas lights, partly aloft. Their sturdy black shoes provide a real-world contrast to their luminescent gowns. No Title (Five Ballet Positions), from 2000, a series of color photographs, shows a woman holding the five ballet positions. The distortion of the photographs seems to capture the difficulty of her efforts and, like many of the other photographs, a slightly embarrassing intimacy.
In the increasingly complicated world of high-tech digital photographic media, it’s gratifying to see photography in its most basic and elemental form. Ess ultimately transcends her simple medium -- beautifully capturing her world/self as pure image, experience and emotion.
On Oct. 18 there will be a family workshop where participants can build and use their own pinhole cameras, make photographs and visit the Barbara Ess exhibition. Call the gallery for more information.
Barbara Ess: I Am Not This Body
Through Oct. 26, The Galleries at Moore, 20th St. and The Parkway, 215-965-4027
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