"Barbara Ess is renowned for her unparalleled use of the pinhole camera, and her effort to "photograph what cannot be photographed" - the unseen world of sensation, thought, and emotion. The haunting images she has created over the last twenty years are gathered in the lushly produced I Am Not This Body, her first major publication.".

"Using the most basic photographic means, a camera with a tiny, lensless aperture, Ess describes the mystery and possibility that lies beneath the apparently mute surfaces of everyday objects. Due to the short focal length of her camera, her subtly-toned compositions plunge towards their luminous centers, their edges shrouded in darkness. Ess's subject matter is complex: the nature of identity; the primal forces and seductions of the natural world; and the interior and exterior lives of the self.

She has an uncanny ability to describe and draw meaning from the world, in all its intricately-woven opacity.".

"Ess's is a conscious quest: to explore "ambiguous perceptual boundaries: between people, between the self and the not-self, between in here and out there." Her photographs insist that life is subjective; reality includes a perceiver, through whom experience is filtered. The psychologically charged photographs in I Am Not This Body probe the primary and personal, and activate the viewer's own imagination and memories.

The strange and affecting images Ess coaxes from her primitive instrument are both utterly simple and richly profound."--BOOK JACKET.