contextual connections- barbara ess taken from aperture

my fascination with pinhole began when teaching photography A level years ago, making cameras out of biscuit tins and pringles tubes, the latter being my favourite form for its incredible distorting capabilities. it creates vast depth of field, and also gives subjects a haunting vignetted allegorical quality, breathing an air of mystery and intrigue. the characteristics of pinhole lend them self to my theme of presence of absence.the lengthy exposures take photography back to its early origins, making you consider the implications for passage of time. this is in three ways- firstly replicated in image making qualities- ghostly trails if something moves, secondly the physical act of staying still exposing for anything from a few seconds to a minute depending on container as camera and lighting conditions- (camera shake can result or cameras get blown over if very light weight,) and thirdly the performative act of using a camera- how others perceive you (take for example a 7 minute binhole exposure of the car park at college i did with students, colleague comes out from reception having seen us on cctv, and wonders why we are standing there checking out his car with a dustbin placed next to it;) i have used pinhole in sedna stories, projected photo-illustrations for inuit folk tales phd performance by my music crazed-genius-composer-friend- dr kerry andrew, the first venture back into my own practice 2 years ago....(kerry and i were teaching together and she babbelled on about needing a visual artist for a visual-music-theatre phd project she was doing, and uh, did i know anyone that might be interested...to which i said, er, yes, me!!!)

the rest of this post is taken from a hugely inspirational book, i am not this body photographs by barabara ess, on the site www.aperture.org

"Book Synopsis
"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.

Over the past two decades Barbara Ess has participated in numerous exhibitions, including a large retrospective of her work at the Queens Museum in 1993. She also works with video and installation."