Barbara Probst is a photographer and contemporary artist, born in Munich in 1964. She lives and works in New York and Munich. Probst’s images use multiple points of view by employing as many as twelve cameras and tripods, arranged around the subject, to photograph multiple points of view captured in separate images but taken simultaneously with a single radio-controlled shutter release. "All of the images of a series present different views of the same place or event at the same moment."[1] While traditional photography directs the viewer to see a single image, Probst’s sequences are composed of a series of separate, though related images incorporating multiple perspective of a single moment.[2] Her photographs cause viewers to experience a shift in time while reconsidering their presence in physical space. "Barbara Probst embroils us in different possible interpretations; focusing on a specific moment in time… she directs our attention to the time before or after…"[3] Her work disregards photography’s standard concept of “decisive moment,” and instead references cinema’s practice of multiple cameras to create movement and diversion.[4]
Probst also questions how the history of photography has trained viewers. Probst guides viewers to go beyond their expectation that images have been altered in Photoshop or simply repeated. Along with artists like Uta Barth and James Welling, Probst encourages viewers to doubt the truth associated with classic photography. She has consistently worked with the same group of actors over many years. Instead of creating a documentary, as would a photographer like Sally Mann or Walker Evans, Probst prevents viewers from reading her body of work as a continuous narrative.
She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at FRAC Brittany, Domaine de Kerguehennec, Bignan, France, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI [5] and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Her work was featured at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the 2006 “New Photography” exhibition.[6] Her work is also included in the MOMA collection.[7] Other solo exhibitions include Murray Guy,[8] New York, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh and a midcareer survey at the Kunstverein Oldenburg, Germany; G Fine Art, Washington D.C.; Jessica Bradley Art+Projects, Toronto, Canada; Kuckei+Kuckei, Berlin; and Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich. She has had three solo exhibitions at Murray Guy Gallery in New York, most recently in 2009 featuring two new multi-paneled works, Exposure #55: Munich, Waisenhausstrasse 65, 01.17.08, 1:55 p.m and Exposure #56: N.Y.C., 428 Broome Street, 06.05.08, 1:42 pm.