The last forty years has seen photography go through a radical stylistic,
technical, and theoretical mutation. Nobody can say exactly when, but at some
point capturing the world “as is” slipped away from the viewfinders of
contemporary photographers. They began to see themselves as manipulators of
reality rather than recorders of it. Bye-bye went the familiar landscape,
portrait, street scene, or casual snapshot, and in came the photograph as a
"directed" or "authored" or "scripted" document. Students of this view
believed their role was not to perfect reality using camera craftsmanship,
but to create their own version of it. The trick was to imagine scenarios of
the world, then fictionalize them on photo film.
This isn’t what anyone would have predicted when the camera—as distinct from
photography—began. So let’s go back to the beginning.
The basic optical principles of the pinhole “camera” (Italian for
“chamber”) are described in Chinese texts as far back as the 5th century BC.
Chinese philosopher Mo Ti deduced that light travels in straight lines by
observing an inverted image when light passed through a pinhole to cast an
image on the opposite side. The next mention of the “camera obscura” wasn’t
until the 10th century AD, when one Yu Chao-Lung used model pagodas to make
pinhole images on a screen.
Western philosophers took a different tack. Aristotle In the 4th century BC
Aristotle commented in his work Problems: "Why is it that when the sun passes
through quadri-laterals, as for instance in wickerwork, it does not produce a
figure rectangular in shape but circular? . . . Why is it that an eclipse of
the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through leaves, the rays are
crescent-shaped where they reach the earth?”
In the 10th century the Arabian physicist and mathematician Ibn Al-Haitam
arranged three candles in a row and put a screen with a small hole between
the candles and the wall. He noted that images (a) were formed only by means
of small holes and (b) that the candle to the right made an image to the left
on the wall. He too deduced that light travels in straight lines.
In the 1850s a Scottish scientist named Sir David Bruiser was apparently the
first to make pinhole photographs. (He also coined the term "pinhole" to
describe them.) The Impressionist movement in France had a considerable
effect on attitudes about the photograph. A traditionalist school believed in
sharp focus and good lenses; a contrarian school of "pictorialists" emulated
the atmospheric qualities of paintings. By the 1890s commercial pinhole
cameras were sold in Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Mass production of lensed cameras and the "new realism" of the first half of
the 20th century edged aside pinhole photography. By the 1930s it was all but
forgotten. In the mid-1960s several photographic artists in widely separated
locales experimented with the pinhole technique. In 1971 Time-Life Books
published The Art of Photography in the well-known Life Library of
Photography, which included a panoramic pinhole image (at which they excel
compared with everyday cameras). The June 1975 issue of Popular Photography
published an article "Pinholes for the People", based on a month-long project
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in which people came into the museum,
picked up a camera from one of the 15,000 made for the occasion, and made an
exposure. The images were developed in the museum’s darkroom and then
displayed in the gallery. Democratic art if ever there was such a thing.
Pinhole cameras are so intriguing to artsy types because they have no “focal
length.” They have infinite depth of field, from a fingertip in front of the
pinhole all the way to infinity. The term "focal length" means the distance
between the pinhole and the film. Pinhole cameras range from ultra wide-angle
cameras to long telephoto cameras. They excel at ultra-wide angle images
because unlike lens-produced images, pinhole ultra-wides remain rectilinear.
If the film plane is flat—as in Barbara Ess’s photos—there will be
vignetting (light fall-off at the corners), producing a circular image in the
middle that is sharp toward the center but becomes more ill-defined the
further it goes outward. The image also may be overexposed at the center and
underexposed at the corners. Barbara Ess exploits all these effects to
produce astigmatic soft-focus smears of semi-image which, taken together,
chart her voyage from the port of technician out into the promontories and
sea lanes of aesthetic philosophy.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, Barbara Ess’s photography would have
us paging through the dictionary adjective by adjective. She is famous for
her attempts to "photograph what cannot be photographed." I Am Not This Body
invites us into her imagination as she leads the way into "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 a normal camera
tends to omit.”
Pinhole images in Ms. Ess's hands are soft, rounded, distant, apparitional,
out of reach, intimate, tinged with loneliness and melancholy. Reality
becomes subtly-toned dreamscapes that are not so much moments of being as
visionary versions of it. Blurry and distorted, she coaxes her subjects from
hallucination and enigma. Distinction between photographer and artist is
erased. All the more so is differentiation between the perceiver and the
perceived. As she puts it:
“The membrane where mind and matter meet is indefinable; it can also be
ambiguous where the self ends and the world begins. The material world comes
to you via the perceptual apparatus and is mediated through and by you. So
sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between what is apparent and what
is ‘real.’”
One of photography's great strengths is its ability to document life while
revealing new meanings in it. Barbara Ess is less interested in discovering
exotic new images than in fathoming the meaningful within the mysteries of
the familiar. Her repertoire of methods is formidable: isolating, magnifying,
staging, suspending belief and disbelief; merging the familiar with the
abstract; mixing ambiguity into perceptual and psychological conditions.
Representing reality is less relevant than making it malleable.
Her landscapes turn common everydayness into surreal romanticism; it’s like
Andrew Wyeth losing his glasses just after he drops acid. One of her
signature tools is an ultra-short distance between pinhole and film. This
yields up very soft foci and such severe vignetting that the image is a
blurry circle centered within a big blot of black. Such mega-vignetting
transforms the image content of a shot into to an extremely transitory
event—a flash of road, a distant barn seen from a gully, her blurred hands
seemingly washing themselves in front of a backdrop of leaves. One almost
expects the images to vanish from the page immediately after the tenth of a
second it takes for the eye to register their existence, so important is her
message of transitoriness.
The book’s images are accompanied by mercifully brief texts—extended
captions, really. No pedant with a pinhole and a philosophy is this lady: Her
“captions” are a cross between mystical realism, a dada manifesto as might
be read by Laurie Anderson, a philosophy that denies philosophy, a tally list
of the day’s most banal events—all of which comprise a viewpoint disembodied
from a theory. She says it better in the text accompanying what is arguably
the definitive image in the book—a picture of a curious but dubious
curly-haired girl, little finger between her lips in the quintessential
gesture of doubt by a little girl, as she is being hoovered out into the
vignette of black beyond the circle of life. Of this she says [all-caps her
own]:
“I AM NOT THIS BODY. But I am. Aching and full of longing. Take a picture of
this meat, this husk. You don’t have me. I am something that cannot be
photographed, cannot be named, defined, translated. There’s experience and
that’s all there is. ... But there’s also all this stuff. It gets in the
way. I’ve always had trouble with stuff. I’ve fought my whole life to have
control over stuff, over the appearance of stuff: my chaotic hair, learning
to play the accordion, getting dressed, being on time, electric bills, the
five ballet positions, getting money, spending money, even just putting one
foot in front of the other. Clear the table. A place for everything and
everything in its place. A battle for order, a battle for space.”
If the utter simplicity and honesty of the pinhole camera lead to this
chiaroscuro of half-existing things, who or what can one trust?
This is just the sort of cerebral angel-food cake the slick art magazines
feast upon, so it is no surprise that her work has occupied covers and inside
pages of the likes of Artforum and Art in America, to say nothing of museum
and gallery catalogs. She’s had one-woman shows at the High Museum of Art,
Atlanta; Curt Marcus Gallery, New York; Faggionato Fine Arts, London; and
Fundacion la Caixa, Barcelona, and at galleries in Madrid, Los Angeles,
Paris, Antwerp, Cologne, and Washington. In 1993 the Queens Museum curated
the traveling exhibition "Barbara Ess: Photography, Installation and Books."
However, none of these are as what-the-heck fun as the title of an anthology
she edited in New York in 1983: Just Another Asshole #6.
In other words, forget the hoo-ha and look at the pictures. They’re so good
you could climb inside.