Barbara Probst’s Photographs Make You Feel the Limits of Knowing

Sculpture was Barbara Probst’s first medium, but, by her own admission, “somehow, I got sidetracked in photography and got stuck there.” In Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, she studied the peculiarities of late 20th-century space that later, at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, got mixed up with a notion of time as so many discordant shards. As she would write in 2014, “the reality that becomes image… is to photography as clay is to modelled sculpture or paint is to painting.”

In 2000, Probst made the first work in what would become her acclaimed “Exposures” series. Still thinking like a sculptor, she set up cameras and assistants in front of herself and around the roof of her friend’s loft in Midtown Manhattan. Then, she took a simple leap of a few inches. The cameras, 12 in total, captured her action from different angles, simultaneously. She now had a question: What does a photograph show—and more importantly, what does it conceal, even when the surface is filled with verity? Here, the look of a New York skyline before the events of September 11, gentrification, the eerie lack of people on the ground.

As of this year, she has made over 180 “Exposures.” A select few serve as the foundation for a Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center retrospective of Probst’s work, curated by Kevin Moore and part of FotoFocus Biennial. Probst takes several shots of a single scene from different vantages, almost simultaneously, then hangs the shots next to each other. Each snapped truth cancels and complicates the other. Perception is multiplied and split into endless points of view, rejecting a totalized read of any given scene. Result: Probst’s “Exposures” leave one reeling in a state of sinister exhilaration. What is she showing, what am I missing? In this, her work uncannily recalls the dazzlingly fragmented opening of one of Alain Resnais’s greatest movies, Muriel (1963), in which the artist plants an image of a temporary wholeness in our minds. A sculpted idea.

Let’s look at just one photograph in this profound exhibition. In the four-part Exposure #123.9: Greenport, N.Y., Silversands Motel, 1400 Silvermere Road, 06.12.17, 7:34 pm (2017), we intrude upon a scene of… intimacy, dirtiness, violence? It’s not clear. First shot: bare legs, draped across a motel bed, framed on one side by a pink-wall. (But why am I sure I see a motel?) Second shot: we see a lamp, an overly clean writing desk, a jetty, and, through a window, a woman staring across the sea. (Or it could be an ocean.) Third: the exterior of the motel from overhead, extremely removed from the earlier scenes, almost contradicting what is presented as the reality of the previous interiors. (Or it could be a different building altogether.) Fourth and last: back inside the room, the clean desk now sullied by spilled coffee, and the mussed-up hair of the owner of the legs (maybe a brunette Laura Palmer?) who lies passively, unmoving. Is she dead? Is this a crime scene? Is she alive? Did she just have sex? Both are equally, and disturbingly, legitimate possibilities.

Susan Sontag once noted that “to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder.” I see Exposure #123.9 and associate it with murder-oriented photography films that challenge our perception of a photograph as a fixed object with legible meaning(s), among them Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and especially Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). In the latter, a London fashion photographer (David Hemmings) happens upon what he thinks is a murder in a park. He thinks he has taken a picture of a murder, but perhaps the murder is in his own mind. As he realizes he doesn’t know what he photographed, or if it exists in reality anymore, he loses his sense of control of the world around him, which he must habitually understand by dealing with the world (women, celebrities, sex) as a gaze-friendly image. Probst parodies this idea: one cannot even photograph an image, or multiple images, and legitimately say, “This is what’s real.” She makes you know that you do not know.

Any truth can be flipped in the next photographic instant. To Sontag, photography has a far vaster “imperial” scope than painting, because “from its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects.” Probst, fully conscious of this, gives you only parts, never a whole scene.