““What we have is our own experience really. There are many realities.””

— Barbara Ess

After a diverse and boundary-pushing career, experimental and influential artist Barbara Ess died on March 4, 2021, at the age of seventy-six.

Ess made her start as a filmmaker and musician, attending the London School of Film Technique before working for London's Film Co-op. Upon her return to New York in the late 1970s, Ess emerged as a figurehead in the downtown No-Wave music scene, a punk-adjacent movement based in nihilism. The genre experimented with atonal dissonance as a confrontation with “truth” and "meaning.” The desired effect was lawlessness— mirroring the New York City of the 1970s. Considering her love of film and music—inherently mutable mediums—it is perhaps ironic that Barbara Ess chose "still-life" as her métier. Still, the kinetic vibrancy of those first vocations persisted in her photography.

Barbara Ess, Roses, 1989, C-Print, 50h x 73w in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York. — Barbara Ess, *Roses*, 1989, C-Print, 50h x 73w in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York.

Barbara Ess’s work vibrates. She was famous for her use of lo-fi equipment—particularly pinhole cameras, which cannot control a shot’s focus. The resulting image is blurred, with a texture reminiscent of an antique photograph. The murmuring haziness that creepifies early portraiture is evident in Ess's work. Rather than an observer of frozen time, the viewer feels they are the still life—grounded, and “present” while Ess's art moves around in a constant flux of meaning and focus. When everything is blurred, everything is the focus.

Indeed, the confusion and claustrophobia characteristic of No-Wave music was on trend for Ess, who once called limitation "[her] muse." What can you make out of nothingness? Answer: anything. Or everything.

Barbara Ess, Peekaboo, 2014-2019, archival pigment print on metallic silver paper, 11h x 14w in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York. — Barbara Ess, *Peekaboo, 2014-2019*, archival pigment print on metallic silver paper, 11h x 14w in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York.

Ess’s degree in Philosophy reflects in her portfolio; her work is photographic meditation. In fact, the title of her first published work, I am Not This Body, borrows from a Buddhist thought exercise. It follows, "'I am not this arm. I am not this leg. I am not this head', etc. until you get to 'I am not this thought'"— as explained by Ess herself. Mindfulness practices, such as thought exercises, strive to relax the mind's focus and block out distracting, perceptual noise to center one in the peace of presence. This motivation drove all of Ess's art. The nihilism-practicing artist was introspective throughout her career— mining to find the core of experience, to "photograph what cannot be photographed”.

Barbara Ess, AC [Shut-In Series], 2018-2019, archival pigment print, 20.69h x 27.69w in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York. — Barbara Ess, *AC [Shut-In Series], 2018-2019*, archival pigment print, 20.69h x 27.69w in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York.

There is simultaneous subjectivity and universality in Barbara Ess's work. With her 2019 series "Shut In," she photographed her immediate surroundings while stuck at home, quarantined for a month—a concept obviously ahead of its time. Ess captured the beautiful mundanity in her apartment's overlooked visual treasures.

The reality is that only Ess can know what each shot means; after all, it is her kitchen, or her window, facing her neighbors' AC. But the simplicity of the scenes, their unassuming nature, and the way in which Ess plays with light and negative space—drawing over standard Ink-Jet printed copies with black, white, and silver crayons before scanning and enlarging them—make the shots feel vast and alive, with depths to plum. Ess expands the theoretical space between subject and object, readying any viewer to project themselves onto it.

Barbara Ess, Guys On Corner [Remote Series], 2012-2019, archival pigment print, 24h x 31.94w in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York. — Barbara Ess, *Guys On Corner [Remote Series]*, 2012-2019, archival pigment print, 24h x 31.94w in. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York.

Ess felt compelled by the separation a camera creates, and she spent much of her career ruminating on distance. She worked to mediate the "in-here" and "out-there." Her work argued that we can be—and are, in fact—in everything and everywhere. As Ess once said, “There’s something very odd about trying to stop the world,” and so, her photographs did not. Ess believed we are limitless, beyond the confines of our bodies, which is perhaps why she worked so fruitfully with limitation. She challenged structure with disorder. The fluctuating aura of her art saturates sight—and if you’re jamming to her music, sound— with a buzz of stimuli, lulling the viewer towards essence of reality: exactly her intention.

Barbara Ess’s death is the loss of a great innovator and pioneer — may her work continue to galvanize audiences for years to come.