Barbara Probst’s Images Loiter Between Interpretation and Fact

In 2000, the German-born artist Barbara Probst arranged a dozen cameras at assorted vantage points – including one above her and one in a neighbouring building – to record herself skipping gleefully across a Manhattan rooftop at night. This romping performance for the camera became the twelve-panel Exposure #1: N.Y.C., 545 8th Avenue, 01.07.00, 10:37 p.m. (2000), and the catalyst for 25 years of inquiry. Probst isn’t merely employing a formal conceit; her recognition that the telling of this unassuming choreography would shift with the multiplication of photographic coordinates also evinces a rich interpretive flexibility. The ‘Exposures’ series (2000–ongoing) is the subject of a vigorous exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, part of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial, curated by Kevin Moore. The succinct title ‘Subjective Evidence’ handily embraces the seemingly contradictory dialectic character of photography, which loiters between interpretation and fact.

The ‘Exposures’ resemble experimentation with the temporal character of the medium by Jan Groover and Eve Sonneman in the 1970s: abutting frames of the same subject, taken seconds apart, that poked the tenacious pieties of the decisive moment. Likewise, Probst’s staged simultaneity undermines the single image as an expert diagnosis of the fleeting. Throughout the exhibition, her arrangements of photographs framing the same instant take two broad forms: groupings, often depicting a lone woman, that combine establishing shots, surveillance and the object of the figure’s gaze; or filmic montages of a more complex instant. Many of the events in her photos appear to be slow and silent – as is the case with Exposure #152: N.Y.C., Broadway & Broome Street, 04.18.20, 10:46 a.m. (2020), which was shot in Manhattan during the COVID-19 lockdowns and features a figure stationed serenely at formerly busy intersections – while others rush quickly to gather fragments.

It occasionally feels, particularly in the landscape photographs, like a mental space or that of immediate memory is being annexed. In her sequences, Probst combines black and white and colour; public and private; and, using a window as a threshold, exterior and interior. Tools of production, like lighting cords and cable releases, are often included, teasing illusion. Probst’s is a methodology of addition and subtraction: the frame severs information and the atomized parts augment. The works abound with cinematic references of a continental pedigree, some quoted directly: Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alfred Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni among them.

Probst’s narratives are frugal: a hand reaching for fruit, a subject glancing away, a man smoking with guarded distraction. These are clinical, although stylish, stagings of individuals making passive, vague gestures. Ambiguity is carefully maintained; the cameras provide narrative momentum. Over time, the ‘Exposures’ have utilized the arsenal of photographic genre: street photography, portraiture, fashion photography, voyeuristic passages in cinema, forensic photography and a clever hybrid of portrait and still life.

Among the energetic variations on theme, it is the portraits, or what Probst refers to as ‘close ups’ – compact clusters of two, three or four people who gaze purposefully in different directions, their regard then met by a corresponding lens – that eclipse the theoretical scaffolding of the project. Here, the slight shifting of the camera makes the viewer acutely conscious of the photograph as a rendering of a three-dimensional subject. The portraits are an intimate transaction, and the viewer’s orientation seems transformed from seeing to being seen, as they find themselves, unsettlingly, on the receiving end of another’s gaze, often a woman’s.

As is well known, one-point perspective has dominated Western vision, with a brief cubist time-out. The single viewer as default author is certainly of some ontological reassurance; the photograph reinforces this habitual singularity of vision. But the ‘Exposures’ methodically complicate the solipsism of representation and encourage plural perspectives: a persuasive fulfilment of the much-heralded democracy of photography.

Barbara Probst, ‘Subjective Evidence’ is on view at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio until 9 February 2025

^{Main image: Barbara Probst, ‘Subjective Evidence’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and and FotoFocus Biennial; photograph: Jacob Drabik}