BARBARA ESS, 1948–2021

Barbara Ess, Stairs (Shut-In series), 2018/2019, archival pigment print, 30.56” x 21.94”. All images courtesy of Barbara Ess and Magenta Plains, New York, NY

BARBARA ESS, who died March 4, 2021, at her home in Elizaville, New York, was famous in the art world for her pinhole photography. A pinhole camera, essentially just a box with a hole in it, has no mechanism for focusing, and so it records images that look something like unfiltered sense impressions—well suited to an artist preoccupied with the uncertainty, and unknowability, of the world she inhabited.

To music fans, Ess was a singer and guitarist in influential No Wave bands like Y Pants and The Static, as well as half of the long-running experimental duo Radio/Guitar with Peggy Ahwesh, professor emeritus of film and electronic arts. But at Bard, where she joined the photography faculty in 1997 and remained until her death, Ess was known as an inspiring and indefatigable teacher, one who, as Associate Professor of Art History and Photography Laurie Dahlberg remembers, always “had something to say to those students who weren’t drawn to all the gear and the technical stuff.”

“She was always assigning articles for them to read,” Dahlberg continues, “and recommending music for them to listen to, or films to see. She was addressing the whole artist.”

“She really did bring color into my life,” Katherine Finkelstein ’07 remembers with a laugh. “She’s the person who taught me color photography, which has been my passion and everything I do since then. Being around her, to me, always felt like we were conspiring, like there was a secret we were part of. . . . It just felt electric.”

“It felt like having someone on your team,” adds Megan Plunkett MFA ’17. “Someone who just showed that you didn’t have to do what you thought you had to do, you just had to be yourself and use your intuition.”

Like many of her students, the sculptor and gallerist Adam Marnie MFA ’12 became Ess’s friend and collaborator. He included her undated piece The Feeling Tone of Sensation, a lead wall hanging that may have been the first piece she ever made, in a 2017 group show he curated at the New York City gallery Magenta Plains. He still remembers their first critique together. “When she thought something was good,” he says, “it meant everything. She was so skeptical of art moves and art language, but something that worked for her . . . I felt really seen.”

Barbara Ess, The Disappearance of the Mind/Body Problem, 1988

Magenta Plains began representing Ess after that show, and her 2019 solo debut with the gallery, Someone to Watch Over Me, which included appropriated surveillance photos as well as photos she’d taken through her apartment windows while homebound with an illness, represented an exciting new direction for her work. Ess was curating a group exhibition when she died. In tribute to her artistic vision, Ahwesh organized a show at the gallery, The Secret Life of Objects, which ran from September 9 through October 16. Works by 10 artists were on view, including key pieces by Ess as well as Radio/Guitar; drawings by Professor of Studio Arts Laura Battle; and Artist in Residence Daniella Dooling’s explorations of her grandmother’s channeled communications with the supernatural world.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1944, Ess moved upstate with her parents and two younger sisters to attend high school in Peekskill. She went on to graduate from the University of Michigan with a degree in literature and philosophy, and studied briefly at the London School of Film Technique (now London Film School). She was a fixture in New York’s downtown art and music scenes through the 1970s and ’80s, and following a well-received show at Cable Gallery, exhibited her photography widely all over the world. In 2001, Aperture published I Am Not This Body, the first major overview of her photographic work, of which art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “Ess works in a gap between the out-there of the world and the in-here of the mind, not to heal the gap but, for truth’s sake, precisely to widen it.” But how was she able to reach so many students? When he first hired her, says Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program, “The photo department was basically myself and Larry Fink, and I’ve always thought of myself and Larry as complementary opposites. I approach students through the mind, and Larry approaches them through the emotions. Barbara came from the spirit.”

“She was,” says writer Lynne Tillman, a friend and collaborator of Ess’s since the early 1970s, “always herself.”

—Will Heinrich MFA ’13 writes about art for the New York Times. His novel The Pearls was published in 2019.