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.
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
--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
