Barbara Probst

Barbara Probst (born 1964) is a contemporary artist whose photographic work consists of multiple images of a single scene, shot simultaneously with several cameras via a radio-controlled system.

Using a mix of color and black-and-white film, she poses her subjects, positioning each lens at a different angle, and then triggers the cameras’ shutters all at once, creating tableaux of two or more individually framed images.

Although the pictures are of the same subject and are taken at the same instant, they provide a range of perspectives.

She lives and works in both New York City and Munich.

She relocated to New York City in 1997.

Probst was born in Munich.

She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (Akademie der Bildenden Künste, München) and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany.

Probst experiments with the temporality and point of view of the shot/counter-shot technique of film by presenting multiple photographs of one scene shot simultaneously with several cameras via a radio-controlled release system.

As a result, the subject of the work becomes the photographic moment of exposure itself.

""Barbara Probst investigates the many ambiguities inherent to the photographic image.

In her work the relationship of the photographic instant to reality is intensified in two distinct ways whereby the captured moment acquires an almost unsettling quality: on the one hand, Barbara Probst abandons the single-eye gaze of the camera and divides it into various points of view.

On the other, she multiplies and diversifies the short moment of the shot.

Thanks to a radio-controlled release system she can simultaneously trigger the shutters of several cameras pointed at the same event or subject from different angles and various distances.

The depictions of each specific instant generated by this method constitute a series.

The relationship of single shots to one another within a series is not determined by a common unifying principle or any stylistic markers.

There is no formal proximity and no overall theme to tie the works together.

Yet the photographs are bound by a tighter but still elusive link, namely the one and only moment of an exposure which is their very subject.

""

- Stefan Schessl

Using a radio-controlled release system, or multiple photographers, she simultaneously triggers the shutters of several cameras pointed at the same scene from various viewpoints.

The resulting sequences of images suspend time and stretch out the split second.

Artistic Director and Publisher of Camera Austria Reinhard Braun writes of this saying:

""Barbara Probst embroils us in different possible interpretations; particularly by apparently focusing on a specific moment in time in the various series, she directs our attention to the time before or after, diverting it away from the meaning of this empictured moment and to the construction of a duration that actually creates the meaning of the action or scene, i.e. that does not give us anything to see but something to think about.

""

- Reinhard Braun

Moreover, Probst employs backdrops, often enlarged stills from well-known movies or landscapes.

This enhances the sense of artifice by presenting multiple locations within the same moment.

Furthermore, equipment such as cameras, studio lights, tripods are visible in the crossfire of images.

These including the photographer(s) themselves become subjects of the moment.

Artforum Critic Brian Scholis asserts her work disregards photography's standard concept of “decisive moment,” and instead references cinema's practice of multiple cameras to create movement and diversion in a "Rashomon-like multiplicity of perspectives".