Photographer Barbara Ess is renowned for her unique use of the pinhole camera, and her effort to "photograph what cannot be photographed." Her haunting images 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.

Barbara Ess was born in Brooklyn. She received a BA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969 and attended the London School of Film Technique in London in 1971. She has exhibited extensively throughout the world and her works belong to numerous public and private collections. Barbara Ess lives and works in New York, where she is represented by the Curt Marcus Gallery.