Barbara Probst

Why Photography? Testing the “Objective Image” Through Sculpture's Multiple Views

Probst studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in the late 1980s. At the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf she worked under Günther Uecker and encountered the teaching and work of Bernd and Hilla Becher^*15. For her 1990 graduation project, she did not display the sculptural model she had made, but presented only a large photograph of it. The photograph could be viewed as a surrogate for an object absent from the gallery, prompting her to question the boundary between physical space and photographic representation^*15. Sculpture requires the body to move around an object in order to understand its form. Her later use of multiple cameras transferred this visual experience, unconfined to one direction, into photography. In “Dissected Moments,” Probst explains that the idea of placing several cameras around a subject came from the sculptural experience of viewing a three-dimensional object from different sides^*10。

. What drew her decisively to photography was its appearance of being more objective than subjective handwork and directly connected to reality. Yet from the beginning, she found that connection “mysterious and questionable”^*1. Because photographs carry such authority as evidence in journalism, criminal investigation, family albums, and advertising, it was insufficient to criticize objectivity from outside the medium. She needed to examine light, film, lenses, the photographer's position, and the viewer as one system, and to show photographically how the same reality becomes radically different images through the apparatus^*2. By moving from sculpture to photography, Probst adopted the medium that makes the strongest claim to direct contact with reality and dismantled its “armor of objectivity” from within.

Exposure #1: A Method That Began with Twelve Cameras

On January 7, 2000, Probst made Exposure #1 on a rooftop along Eighth Avenue in New York, establishing the method she has continued in Exposures. Twelve cameras placed across the rooftop and nearby buildings photographed her jumping at exactly the same moment, and the twelve images were presented as one work^*15. She initially expected the experiment to clarify the relation between photography and reality, but discovered that twelve photographs of the same instant told twelve different stories^*2. In one image the jump becomes the event; in another, the set, tripods, neighboring cameras, and urban space come into view. Every photograph is accurate as a record, yet none explains the whole event by itself. Probst did not minimize these discrepancies as errors. In later works she intensified differences of distance, focal length, black and white versus color, and framing. As an official text notes, multiple angles do not complete the event; they create a situation in which no “correct viewpoint” exists^*20. The twelve cameras became an apparatus through which one photograph exposes the way another conceals its own partiality.

Simultaneity: Fixing Time and Changing Only Space

The central operation of Exposures is that several cameras release their shutters at the same moment. The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art explains that groups of roughly two to six large photographs record the same action simultaneously from different directions, demonstrating the many ways one moment can be experienced^*7. Because the shutter time is identical, the differences among the photographs cannot be explained by movement in the subject. Foreground and background, near and far, face and back of the head, event and shooting location appear as differences produced by camera position and lens. As LensCulture notes, Probst combines digital cameras, black-and-white film, color negatives, transparencies, and different focal lengths, showing how the same reality enters different image systems through equipment^*13。 . Synchronizing time makes possible an experiment that limits the variables other than viewpoint. If subject and action remain the same, the gaps among images can be read as differences in the way camera position and equipment translate reality. Probst has also explained that every photograph is equally true, while viewpoint, angle, setting, and framing determine the image^*23。

Bringing Cameras and Crew into the Frame

Other cameras, tripods, cables, lighting, and members of the production crew frequently appear in Probst's photographs. Conventional photography and cinema keep the apparatus outside the frame, allowing viewers to enter a story without considering where they are looking from. Probst breaks this rule by moving the shooting position outside one image into the interior of another. Galerie Rudolfinum argues that this method deprives viewers of a single stable position and leaves them uncertain which viewpoint they should claim as their own^*9. The visible apparatus does not simply invalidate the photographs. It shows concretely that every photograph has conditions of production, and that these conditions normally remain unseen while creating the impression of eyewitness testimony.

The Visual Grammar of Cinema, Fashion, and Crime Photography

Exposures uses pursuits, falls, exchanged glances, guns, cars, and poses reminiscent of fashion shoots. In an official interview, Probst says that she draws on cinematic conventions such as shot/reverse shot, close-up, and long shot, then compresses them into a single instant^*2. In film, shots from different angles are edited into temporal sequence and received as a continuous narrative. In her installations, all shots coexist, without an edit deciding what came first, who is looking, or which image establishes cause. Aperture notes that signs from Hollywood cinema, fashion, surveillance, and street photography collide without converging on one explanation^*5. A critical essay published on Probst's website argues that established images drawn from news, advertising, cinema, fashion, and television crime drama enter her work, while the proliferation of images on Instagram and TikTok has made it harder to see reality apart from familiar pictures^*4. Brian Sholis likewise observes that social media's exaggeration and cropping have broadened awareness that every photograph presents a partial viewpoint^*21. Exposures demonstrates that an increase in images does not automatically complete an event or its chain of causality.

Exhibition Space: Deciding Which Contradictory Image Carries Authority

A work does not necessarily consist of photographs of equal size; aspect ratio, dimensions, color, and black and white may all vary. Le BAL's exhibition and publication describe Probst's work as “image multiples” rather than single photographs and stress that meaning is produced by their arrangement on the wall^*8. Viewers move from a facial close-up to the back of a head, from a figure to cameras and crew, and from an action in the street to a distant city view. Each move requires them to revise the psychology, cause, and witness position inferred from the previous photograph. As commentary on Exposure #11B suggests, a color photograph from street level places a figure at the center of an incident, while a black-and-white view from above approaches the visual logic of surveillance or a sniper's position^*20. Because both images were made at the same time, viewers cannot rank one as truth and the other as supplementary. Nearly life-size figures and the inclusion of the camera apparatus in another image connect the viewer's body to several positions inside the work. As Probst's reference to Brechtian estrangement indicates, the viewer is returned, immediately after identifying with a figure, to the realization that lenses and display have directed that response^*2. To say that “the viewer becomes the editor” means repeatedly examining which image one has authorized when faced with contradictory documents.

Exposure #31: The Distance Between Close-Up and City

MoMA's Exposure #31: N.Y.C., 249 W 34th Street, 01.02.05, 4:41 p.m. consists of two inkjet prints^*6. The two photographs, made at the same moment, place a close view of a person or action beside a view that locates it within the city. On its own, the close image invites a reading of expression or posture as psychological evidence. The adjacent photograph reveals the shooting conditions or surroundings, opening that reading toward performance, chance, and another person's line of sight. The work locates no correct answer between the two images; it makes viewers attend to the speed with which photographs generate meaning.

Exposure #11A and Exposure #78: Refusing to Fix a Subject's Psychology

SFMOMA's Exposure #11A: N.Y.C., Duane & Church Streets, 06.10.02, 3:07 p.m. is a two-part work in which the same scene appears from different distances and directions^*11. MoMA's Exposure #78, NYC, Collister and Hubert St. is also a diptych, with the body's orientation, the street, and suggestions of off-frame activity altering the interpretation of each image^*12. Probst's figures resemble film characters but are given no past or motivation. The cinematic habit of treating the close-up as evidence of an interior state is interrupted by an impassive body from another angle or by the visible shooting location.

Reediting the Method Through Photobooks and Exhibitions

MoMA's 2006 New Photography exhibition introduced an international audience to the way Probst's multiple photographs form a single work in exhibition space^*3. The Moment in Space surveys more than two decades of Exposures, allowing readers to consider the long titles—recording time, place, and number of images—alongside combinations that change on the wall^*17. Material from Kuckei + Kuckei, which has represented the artist for many years, shows how her inquiry into the conditions that construct a photograph continues across early works, still lifes, and video even as the subject changes^*16. A 2024 exhibition at Kunstmuseum Luzern included recent video as well as photography, tracing how the problem of simultaneous exposure developed in a time-based medium^*18. An exhibition at the Sprengel Museum likewise surveyed her method of positioning camera, viewer, and subject from the early work to recent projects^*22. The series can continue because multiple cameras are more than a signature style. Each change of subject—from people to still life, street, or moving image—provides new conditions for testing which visual conventions make a single photograph appear to be natural evidence.

Why Multiple Pieces of Evidence Do Not Complete a Single Truth

Multiple viewpoints may seem to reduce blind spots, as surveillance cameras do, and thereby complete the facts. Probst produces the opposite result. In a MoMA audio commentary, she explains that even when a photograph appears to portray reality objectively, camera position, angle, settings, and framing determine the image, and that every photograph of the same moment is equally true^*23. When a facial expression, the back of a head, the production crew, and a distant city view appear together, none can be dismissed as false, yet no single image can function as complete evidence. FotoFocus's phrase “subjective evidence” identifies evidence as an image that has necessarily passed through a particular position and selection^*19. A review in Blind likewise argues that multiple images amplify the instability of viewpoint and narrative instead of completing one reality^*14. The essay “What We See,” published on the artist's website, reads Exposure #1 as one “global exposure” shared by twelve views rather than twelve independent events, arguing that additional images increase both the information and the uncertainty of the scene^*4. Probst examines the mechanism through which photography's connection to reality becomes different stories through angle, distance, lens, and framing. Because more information does not produce closure, viewers must ask not only what happened, but why they believed a particular image constituted the event.

Reworking the Decisive Moment and Sequential Photography

Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photographs divided time into minute stages to analyze movement that the naked eye could not easily register. Henri Cartier-Bresson's “decisive moment” popularized the idea that a photographer selects the single image in which form and event coincide. Probst adds another condition to these lineages: several viewpoints at exactly the same time. Photoworks describes Exposure #1 as a work made simultaneously by twelve cameras and positions it as one work with multiple points of entry^*15. After Probst, the multi-image work could be understood not only as sequential narrative or typological comparison, but as a form in which photographs expose one another's concealed camera positions. Photographic objectivity became a question of how several partial viewpoints are shown together. In an Aperture interview, Probst connects the inability to trust a single viewpoint and narrative with the multiple positions present in social life^*5. Exposures therefore extends beyond a formal experiment within photography. It also tests, from other positions that exist at the same time, the power of a single viewpoint to stand for a person or event.