Barbara Probst

[Missing Image]

Unlike the suspension of disbelief elicited by fiction, with photographs we can know and doubt simultaneously. German-born Barbara Probst has been examining this aspect of the medium since the early 2000s, creating a body of work that at once clarifies and complicates the idea of a photographic record. Probst’s solo exhibition at Biel’s CentrePasquArt travelled from the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, though the two institutions exhibited different selections of work.

Works of two to 13 parts made between 2001 and 2012 were on show in Biel, with the artist’s concerns prior to this period, such as photographic illusions of space, illustrated in a long vitrine of artist’s publications. The earliest full-scale piece displayed was Exposure #9: N.Y.C., Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 p.m. (2001), which demonstrates the method Probst is still elaborating to this day: photographing one instant from multiple viewpoints. Six landscape prints show a woman crossing a gloomy station concourse. In one her face and green raincoat are picked out by a light, although the rest of the image is dark; another highlights the same woman but reveals the light bearer and a crouching photographer. Any one of these could, in isolation, have appeared as an impromptu impression, but as a group they demonstrate controlled staging.

While the chiaroscuro of the scene in the station sets up a binary relationship between the central, illuminated, figures and the dark periphery, most of Probst’s subsequent works are brightly lit, suggesting an almost scientific method and a cool neutrality that spills into the gallery setting. Probst’s cast of assistants are pictured repeatedly, either on the street or in studio interiors. The multiple perspectives reveal a photographer’s tools: tripods, cameras and shutter release remotes, as well as occasionally divergent backdrops. Exposure #49: N.Y.C., 555 8th Avenue, 05.21.07, 4.02 p.m. (2007) brings us close to a model standing in the midst of this equipment. Despite 12 different perspectives that allow us to reconstruct Probst’s bare staging, something of the documented instant still feels unknown. Exposure #85: N.Y.C., Broome & Crosby Streets, 01.11.11, 12.31 p.m., (2011) is a suite of 13 prints, hung in the round. The scene takes place in an interior – a woman sits on a couch and a man looks out the window – and onto the street below, where another woman pulls her coat tight, a cyclist moves among pedestrians. A hole in a sock warrants the same attention as the urban red-brick streetscape; each image is illuminated evenly. Numerous viewpoints do not clarify or specify, but rather unravel some of countless concurrent narrative possibilities within the scene and its details.

Though Probst has also undertaken works without human subjects, the great pleasure in this exhibition lay in observing the evolution of her works over the past 13 years as guided by her cast of assistants. From the beginning Probst acknowledges these figures, conceding their part in her constructions. But sharing authorship does not diffuse what she produces. On the contrary, the revelation of both the context and the makers of an image lays the process bare and, in doing so, proves how the result still clings to a certain verisimilitude. Accepting this paradoxical nature of the medium, it felt like leafing through a family album, in which familiar faces allow an evolving understanding of their subjecthood and of our viewing, not to mention the limitations of a singular photograph. The particular moments are informative, but incidental, in the still ongoing process of learning how we look at photography and how the medium, in return, determines its own observation.