Barbara Ess, Roland Barthes, and Herve Guibert, The Snapshot and a Ritual of Loneliness

Barbara Ess's Shut-In series is littered with an unnamed yet intimate nostalgia, creating a dilemma that the unidentified can be thought of more intimately than that which we can immediately identify and define. The creation of liminal spaces as a ritualistic practice is an essential part of understanding Ess's work, utilizing a pin-hole camera an obsolete photographic practice originating from the camera obscura the earliest form of photography. Originally the invention of the pinhole camera lent itself as a visual drawing aid to traditional artists rather than a medium in its own right. The usage of the "obsolete" in art-making acts as a way of embracing ritualistic practices that challenge the overwhelming idea that the final creation is always more impactful than the process. That an attitude of artmaking increasingly reliant on efficiency is antithetical to what Ess hopes to achieve in creating work that empathizes with the fact that we can't hold onto everything forever and that even photography does not mitigate time passing.

I'm always interested in artists who intentionally seek out to make their work not so immediately accessible. Always leaving room for a private memory. Shut-In leaned into confinement as a means of interrogating the spaces in which we find comfort. The snapshot esc style as its own genre is rooted in a desire to find a subjective truth separate from the photograph's identity as purely a document. The series was created in familiarity with Ess's apartment to say that we must take time to care for the mundane aspects of life. Ess pays clear respect to the Pictoralism genre which saw photography as much more than documentary but as a means of projecting emotional intent. Evoking a painterly quality and imploring the viewer to consider the mystery behind the process. The practice of the pin-hole camera as an instrument of distancing allows for an understanding that we ultimately photograph things to drive them out of our minds whether that be people or places or objects, it can be an act of love but in the same instance, it can be a means of coming to terms. To photograph something is to render it in the past tense. Essayist and art critic Roland Barthes discusses at length the beauty of the mundane present in the snapshot and reference to intentionality argues how the existence of an objective truth in photography is deceptively hard to maintain, to quote from Camera Lucida, "Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object". Extensive isolation allows for a new kind of patience to be given to intimacy. Barthes argues that in Ess's case, she cannot photograph a flower on a windowsill as both the object and its associated nostalgia. Barthes says "What I can name cannot really prick me" and that which cannot be named is a good provocation.

Barthes writes that the absurdness of history lies in the fact that to recognize history we must be excluded from it. Photographing household materials in the way that Ess works as not being so immediately decipherable allows for memory to imprint itself onto the photographs. That you first recognize how you're associated with the chair or the tea kettle before recognizing its purpose. We are exceptionally lonely in this process. Following the decline in health of his mother Barthes fell into an inconsolable melancholy which only seemed to be mediated through browsing photo albums of which his mother was pictured. Tracing back her footsteps through images as if to assure himself that she was truly gone. Barthes finds issue however in recognizing the memory of his mother in many of these photographs except for a singular image where she is pictured as a child in a greenhouse or winter garden. The image that consoled him the most was of his mother as a child, no more than five years old. That is a profoundly isolating experience to find the most solace in a memory before you existed. The farthest her memory could extend from the current moment. Barthes writes "I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother. The distinctness of her face, the naive attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding herself, and finally her expression, which distinguished her, like Good from Evil, from the hysterical little girl, from the simpering doll who plays at being a grownup-all this constituted the figure of a sovereign innocence". Thinking of his mother as once a child simultaneously renders her memory as both infinite and finite. The only means of getting to the most "honest" version of her, before motherhood forever altered her identity was through the winter garden photograph. Barthes attempts to close the distance in this photograph whilst admitting that it's only bearable to love from afar. How you can almost be at peace with something but it'll continue to define you.

Photographer and prolific writer Herve Guibert discusses the tangible distance implied in a photograph through his collection of essays, "The Ghost Image." One of the most affecting is a retelling of events in which Guibert photographed his aging mother, whom he described as reaching a "desperate age." Guibert details this act as rescuing his mother who he felt was never in control of her image, constantly facing pressure to mimic or appease in regards to her role as a mother or wife. Guibert perhaps unconsciously sought to render her in a way that was before his birth. A kind of forbidden image. "I had her try on several old dresses (I remembered them from my childhood), for example, the blue dress with flounces and white polka dots, which I associate with Sunday, with festivity, with summer, with pleasure; but either my mother could no longer "get into the dress," or the dress seemed too much to me,". Guibert states how in the narrow moment of posing and taking the photo his mother was rendered almost a decade younger only to instantaneously revert back. "I noticed that her features had already relaxed, and that the little wrinkles that threatened to pinch her mouth had completely disappeared. (For a moment I was able to stop time and old age-". That it was as if through this posed image it was the last time he saw his mother truly alive. "-for once the picture was taken, the image fixed, the process of aging would continue-". For once the film was developed it was revealed that the entire roll was unexposed from end to end. The essential moment was lost, sacrificed in favor of memory but for Guibert and his mother, it was as if the scene had never existed in the first place. There was no recourse for recapturing the moment it wasn't as simple as just reapplying powder and gloss and posing once more. The opportunity had passed and from that moment Guibert states "I no longer recognized her, I wanted to forget her, to stop seeing her, to remain forever with the image."