In VIEWING ROOM III: Barbara Ess, the emotional charge lies in the fragile tension between presence and disappearance, between the eye and its inability to hold steady the world it longs to grasp. Visitors to this survey at Magenta Plains experience a visual language that dissolves certainty, curated with reverence for Ess’s lifelong pursuit of unfixing photographic expectation. The presentation invites guests to step into the wavering space she spent decades mapping.
A sense of joy permeates the ethereal works of Barbara Ess as she works through a liminal field. Forever connected to NYC music and art culture, Ess also captured her ghostly photographs in upstate NY, where she taught for many years. While navigating urban and rural spaces, Ess continually found new ways to push culture forward. Those who knew her well spoke of her excitement with explorations of the self, the moment, and the creative process, constantly finding new avenues of interest.
Ess’s signature pinhole photographs with their soft monochromatic surfaces draw visitors into a perceptual fog as she chooses subjects ranging from Dolly Parton to flowers. The images feel less like documents and more like whispered confessions: a snake coiled in a living room, a broken cup shimmering with quiet ruin, a Barbie doll looming with uncanny presence, roses dissolving into shadow, or a self‑portrait folding the surrounding silence inward. The optical pull of Ess’s pinhole and surveillance lenses lures the viewer creating a unique portal into varying subjects from a simple kitchen or fire escape to highways and wild horses.
Elsewhere, images made with toy microscopes, small telescopes, and lo-fi devices complicate the experience. Distances collapse; boundaries blur. An empty shoreline refuses to separate foreground from horizon. A tilted interior compresses its occupants into a shallow, airless plane. Dust, magnified like drifting debris, interrupts the surface of the print. Ess leans into the glitch, the unintended artifact, turning imperfection into the subject itself. In these works, perception becomes tremulous and incomplete, as if her camera were trying to see not the world, but the spaces between beings.
The sense of ethereal drift that permeates the photographs echoes in Ess’s later video and sound projects. Audio murmurs and low-frequency hums form a phantom architecture that visitors feel more than hear. These works meditate on separation, longing, and the shifting border between the self and the not-self, shaped by Ess’s deep connection to experimental music and performance in New York’s downtown scene. She resisted letting any medium define the limits of her vision.
Barbara Ess, born in Brooklyn in 1944, spent her life navigating this unstable terrain. Educated at the University of Michigan and the London School of Film Technique, she returned to New York with generative urgency, moving between photography, performance, publishing, and sound. She exhibited widely in the U.S. and Europe, with retrospectives at the Queens Museum, the Center for Fine Arts Miami, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Her work is held in major collections including the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMOMA, MOCA Los Angeles, the Pompidou Center, and the Smithsonian Institution. She taught for over two decades as Associate Professor of Photography at Bard College.
VIEWING ROOM III is on view from November 6 to December 20, 2025 at Magenta Plains, located at 149 Canal Street, New York, NY 10002. In a historical moment awash with images promising clarity, these photographs feel radical and deeply human, reminding us that to see is always to lose something, and in that blur, new meanings quietly emerge.