Barbara Ess is a veteran artist using the proto-photographic technology of pinhole cameras to make work that persuasively comments on the embodied construction of visual experience, its distortions and various frailties, integrating those elements into the conceptual effect of her photography. Although her pictures are indeed dream-like in nature, they have at the same time an underlying rigour.
"I think of my work as an investigation and it's always concerned with the same question: Exactly what is the true nature of reality?" says New York artist Barbara Ess of her darkly disturbing photographs.
"I don't know if there's an essential reality it's possible for us to get a grip on," she adds, "but I know I don't experience life primarily in terms of the physical world--my emotions and memories play a much larger role in shaping my experience as a human. I know there's a me that's more solid than this body I move through the world in."
This interview, although it is several years old, does a great job of outlining what she's interested in and the evolution of her work. (It also contains an inexplicable moment of confusion on the part of its author between a pinhole photograph and a photogram, but aside from that is well deserving of your time).
