7-10 October 2010
Hall 20, Booth 129
Berlin, Germany
The subject of Barbara Probst’s series Exposures (begun in 2000) is no less than the relation between time, perception, the photograph and reality. She uses several cameras to photograph one and the same (staged) action, event or situation from different perspectives at the same time. Then she selects and arranges them to make tableaux that are usually in several parts, or diptychs at the very least. Exposure, revelation, discovery, unmasking, the decisive moment, the ‘armed’ eye—Probst works her way through all these synonyms for photography in her installations. The individual parts of Exposures show unmistakably that the reconstruction of meaning, of an event or even of historical processes on the basis of photography is a virtually impossible undertaking. She reminds us of the fact that Walter Benjamin and, later, Victor Burgin wrote that photography is always accompanied by a text, whether explicit or implicit. And she also shows that omissions and contradictions are part of photographic practice itself. Exposures demonstrates the fact that an image not only expresses something but also causes something else—an ‘other’ image—to disappear, precisely when both refer to the same thing or supposedly the same ‘reality.’ (Reinhard Braun)
Barbara Probst lives and works in New York and Munich. Her work was included in several group shows this year: at Tate Modern, London, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, MoMA New York and Reina Sofia, Madrid. In 2007 Steidl published an extensive monograph of her work on the occasion of her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.