Barbara Ess

Crossing (2011)

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 became a photography professor 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.

Barbara Ess received a BA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan and attended the London School of Film Technique in London. Upon her return to New York City she became involved with music, performance, photography and the creation of artist books. Ess had numerous solo exhibitions of her work throughout the United States and Europe, including retrospectives at White Columns, New York, NY; the Queens Museum, NY; the Center for Fine Arts, Miami, FL and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Her photographs have been included in group exhibitions at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, CA; The Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Tang Museum, Sarasota Springs, NY; New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; and National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan. Barbara Ess was the subject of cover stories in Artforum and Art in America and a monograph of her work, I Am Not This Body, was published by Aperture in 2001. Her work is in numerous permanent collections, including The Jewish Museum in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center, Pompidou Center/Musée d’Art Moderne, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX. Ess was an Associate Professor of Photography at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson for over two decades.