Seeing Through Photography – Barbara Probst
Barbara Probst, The National Museum of Photography, The Black Diamond, Copenhagen, Denmark.
4 October 2013 - 11 January 2014.
The German photographer Barbara Probst challenges photography's status as a witness of truth.
No one will question the fact that the single moment has more than one aspect. However, the fact that it, depending on the particular point of view, can become so different from what we first believed we saw can be a surprise. Barbara Probst (b. 1964) shows the multifarious aspects of the moment.
The National Museum of Photography's exhibition Barbara Probst is the photographer's first solo exhibition in Denmark. The exhibition presents works from the series Exposures, on which Probst has been working since 2000.
Of her work Barbara Probst has said: “My purpose is to examine what photography can produce out of what was there.” For this purpose Probst uses, not just one, but a series of cameras arranged around the same subject. Each has its own setting for colour, depth of field and exposure and, using a remote control, all the cameras take a photograph at exactly the same moment. This creates a series of images of the subject. They do not resemble each other in terms of style or theme; the only thing that connects them is the moment, at which Probst pressed the shutter release button.
Probst's works are based on a continual examination of the complex relationship between photography and reality, playing with the myriad of options, which the photographic medium provides for the representation of that, which it depicts. Her works tease us and challenge our trust in photography. While they provide us with multiple angles and details, at the same time they make us aware of all the things we cannot see. In fact, the more we see, the more we realise that we cannot see everything. Like all representations, photography provides us with only a part of the truth.
Barbara Probst lives and works in Munich and New York. Her works are represented in museums and public collections all over the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA in New York, and have been presented in solo exhibitions in New York, Edinburgh, Washington, Toronto, Berlin and Munich etc.
You can download photos from www.kb.dk/pressphoto. For further information please contact exhibition producer Christina Back on +45 33 47 42 26 or chrb@kb.dk.
The exhibition has been curated by the National Museum of Photography in collaboration with the Kuckei+Kuckei Gallery and Kunsthaus CentrePasquArt, Biel. The exhibition is accompanied by a new book about Barbara Probst’s work, published by Hatje Cantz, and with contributions from a number of writers, including the exhibition's curator, Jens Erdman Rasmussen.
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