Introduction

When artist Barbara Ess signed up to monitor the Texas-Mexico border online, she was granted access to a network of low resolution, heat-sensitive cameras. The live stream program was designed as a virtual community watch to monitor suspicious activity, possible drug trafficking, and border crossings. Ess writes she was “[fascinated] by the feeling of being present at the border from such a distance,” and she began recording events that she witnessed in real time and thousands of miles away. She did not report any of her observations. Instead, the artist thought of remote viewing as an exercise in connecting the interior self with the external world. Barbara Ess began her career in 1970s downtown Manhattan, where she played in bands, designed flyers, wrote a zine–titled Just Another Asshole–and took photos. Ess became instrumental in establishing a scene. “The natural subject of photography,” she stated in one of her undated text-based works, “is voyeurism.” In the wake of the HIV epidemic and rampant gentrification of Manhattan, in the early 1990s, she joined the feminist Women’s Action Coalition, whose logo notably features a watchful eye. She later became a professor for photography at Bard College. Until her death in 2021, she played the role of distanced spectator who observed with focused attention, and she wanted to discover what it is like to be where she is not. Her gaze contained a sense of longing; looking itself was the subject of her work.