I am Not This Body

A book of strange and affecting images that evoke both the sublime and the impossible

Barbara Ess is renowned for her unique use of the pinhole camera, and her effort to "photograph what cannot be photographed." These haunting images, made over the last twenty years, describe a mysterious world of seemingly mundane surfaces where everyday objects are mantled in inscrutability.

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." Using a simple cardboard camera with no lens and a minute aperture, Ess creates unsettling, richly evocative photographs. I Am Not This Body probes the primary, personal experience, and depends on the viewer's imagination, instincts, and memories.