What We See
Kevin Moore
A 1977 bank robbery in Munich, Germany, caused quite a stir. Photographers raced to the scene as a masked gunman, holed up inside with hostages, made demands by telephone. The police, camped outside amidst press and onlookers, surveilled the situation from within a van, scouring security monitors showing different angles on the bank’s interior. Arriving late on the scene, Erwin Köster, a taciturn, unassuming investigator, hatched a plan to negotiate, a plan requiring him to walk defenseless into the bank while lugging a clunky, live security monitor as proof to the assailant that a getaway car waited outside. Back in the van, police officers watched closely, viewing Köster, the hostages and the gunman on various screens simultaneously. After a brief tussle, registered in fragmented images flickering across various screens, the group exited the building in a tense huddle. Unexpectedly, the gunman pushed Köster into a police car and the two sped away, initiating a frantic chase through the Bavarian Alps, with police and photojournalists in tow. Eventually, the fugitive was shot dead in a nondescript parking garage. Köster survived and was celebrated for his skill as an intuitive, investigative tactitian.
If the incident sounds familiar, you might remember it from the popular German crime drama Der Alte, a program Barbara Probst watched as a teenager. (Known as The Old Fox in English, the show is still in production, with periodic cast updates.) Visually innovative, Der Alte borrowed techniques from French New Wave Cinema of the previous decade, adopting, notably, jump cuts, unusual perspectives and mise-en-abyme images (images embedded within images) as its visual vocabulary for telling American-style crime stories. The aesthetic was perfectly suited to the drama. The rapid pace rushed viewers in and out of scenes, demanding they piece out narratives based on scattered clues, while the odd camera angles suggested ubiquitous surveillance systems and the viewpoint of investigators attempting to “see things differently.” Essentially, detective Köster performed as a stand-in for viewers, whose task was to make sense of the world based on incomplete narratives and random clues. Der Alte was more than entertainment. It was an exercise in visual sleuthing, a primer of sorts for late-twentieth-century media literacy.
Probst does not recall watching this particular episode of Der Alte—“Die Dienstreise” (the business trip)—though the similarities to her work are striking: the multiple, simultaneous perspectives on a given scene; the swarms of photographers, cameras blocking faces, generating in real time the images circulating on screen; the unusual perspectives and fixation on surveillance; the fragmented body parts and overturned objects; and the tightly cropped, illusionistic advertising posters, taken at first glance for real. Beyond formal motifs, Probst’s photographs demand a similar kind of sleuthing. Even the most modest, two-part images, such as the portraits (or “close-ups,” as Probst calls them), propose a riddle to be solved: where are the cameras in relation to their sitters? But it is the large, multi-part series, such as Exposure #56 (2008), that require real effort. One reads the clues: a man smoking, a woman reaching for an apple, hands holding a newspaper, a woman’s legs extending from behind a chair, an occluded figure, a wistful expression. The scene is fundamentally, intentionally incoherent, a mystery begging to be solved. But the images resist. A newspaper headline reads “Decisions,” accompanied by a portrait of Obama, offering more of a taunt than real resolve, as if to say, maddeningly: make up your own stories (plural), the “decisions” are yours.
Few artists downplay their choice of subject matter so emphatically as Barbara Probst. “My work is really more about how we see and not so much what we see,” she has said. And, “I have tried time and again to reduce the subjects. What I am interested in, after all, is not what is represented but how it is represented.” Critics like to say the work is about photography itself, about those fundamental attributes of the medium pertaining to time and space, celebrated most iconically by Henri Cartier-Bresson as the “decisive moment.” Probst complicates this photographic absolute by upping the ante, trading up the decisive moment for multiple moments, like an astute stock broker playing the market. Probst’s unique photographic fractures—“situations that she explodes in her work”—produce an overabundance, multiplying exponentially the volume of information of a given scene while, paradoxically, decreasing the scene’s legibility. More images offer more data, but more images also raise more questions, mostly having to do with sorting out the narrative. When it comes to a single photograph, we are accustomed to jumping to conclusions. Cartier-Bresson’s Gare St. Lazare (1932), for example, reveals an instant in which we immediately grasp that a rainstorm has occurred, a man leaps a puddle, the circus is in town. There may well be more going on here but the scene reads as a snapshot, a vignette of Parisian life. A single image exists as its own hermetic world.
Multiple photographs, however, threaten to shatter the narrative into endless possibilities, into endless possible narratives. Probst’s Exposure #1 (2000), for example, comprises twelve separate unique photographs and a good bit of mystery. Taken at night on a Midtown Manhattan rooftop, it is a lot to take in, much like New York itself. Relievedly, this urexposure may be understood not as twelve separate exposures but as a global exposure with a photographic subject. That subject might be boiled down to “the moment in space,” the title of a recent Probst exhibition and catalogue; it is indeed one moment in space, seen from multiple perspectives. This seminal work predates Probst’s higher-tech system of simultaneous, radio-controlled shutter releases. Capitalizing on the darkness, she had two assistants open the lenses of all twelve cameras while activating two strobes. Probst then jumped, and the assistants quickly closed the lens caps. Cameras on tripods appear visible throughout the frames. Photography itself is literally on display, and so are its attributes: a moment in space, animated for analysis.
Technique is at the forefront in this early work and it is easily absorbed into photographic discourse as a “breakthrough,” as a detonation of Cartier-Bresson’s Gare St. Lazare, an act both destructive and procreative. But what else is happening? Probst’s intention to show “how we see” is often challenged by her own subject matter—the “what we see”—which can be deliciously distracting.
To choose yourself as subject might be expedient but it is also inescapably autobiographical. When she made Exposure #1, Probst had just arrived in New York, where she took up residence in the back room of a friend’s top-floor loft, just below the rooftop of that seminal work. Probst relates that on the eve of her voyage to New York, she watched a Luis Trenker film from the 1930s, Der verlorene Sohn (the prodigal son), the story of a Swiss man who travels to New York to seek his fortune. The segue marking the protagonist’s transfer from Europe to America involves a dramatic slow fade from the Alps to the Manhattan skyline, and the film continues, featuring vertiginous views of New York, similar to Probst’s in Exposure #1, as our hero explores his new environment. “New York looks magical from a distance—like a mountain range,” Probst recorded in her diary that same year.
To widen the conversation, several works by Probst from this early period, many shot on the same Midtown rooftop (where she has photographed again as recently as 2023—see Exposure #183), offer a direct correlation between New York and the Alps. A diptych titled Exposure #39 (2006) features, in one frame, an exuberant young woman jumping in front of an alpine landscape and, in the second frame, the same young woman seen from afar, jumping in front of a backdrop of an alpine landscape on top of a Manhattan rooftop. Probst softly dismisses this work as an “illustration,” a depiction of her circumstance living between New York and Germany, and indeed her career has since steered toward tableaux of greater subtlety and ambiguity—toward the “how we see.” Yet a sense of the environmental sublime is captured in these early works, underscored by Probst and her model’s playful actions amidst the visual intensity of New York.
Exposures #1 and #39 convey even more than photography as subject and embedded biography. They also present examples of a common image archive, one shared by virtually everyone on the planet, drawing from such diverse sources as news media, advertising, family photographs, movies, fashion, and television crime dramas. And these specific image-subjects double as both clichéd photographic types and images with their own legitimate personal content. At times, distinguishing between the two can be difficult. Probst has commented that when she first arrived in New York, her head was full of images from King Kong, Taxi Driver, and Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and that the challenge was to “look behind the impervious curtain of pictures” to see the real New York. This has been a decades-long project for her, one with no clear resolution. The world we see daily, in fragmented, half-acknowledged glimpses, is so unavoidably colored by the image reservoirs we carry within, no real separation can occur. “The fictionality of Manhattan seemed to have conquered its own reality,” Probst chillingly observes. This statement hints at a larger point: that we ultimately submit to images in an effort to grasp reality. Certainly, the mass explosion of images over the past twenty years, in forums such as Instagram and Tik-Tok, has fueled the dystopic suspicion that our life experiences are being dominated by image clichés. In the end, the battle might be a losing one, but Probst’s efforts add dimension to the struggle.
It follows, then, that image genres are a staple of Probst’s approach. Yet these categories hew to a unique sensibility, maintaining both universal and private meanings. The portraits, for example, which Probst refers to as “close-ups,” are often populated by the artist’s extended family and models, many of whom have become close friends. (Probst prefers the term close-up because a “portrait portrays a person.”) The close-ups extend one of photography’s most valued traditions, the preservation of an individual’s likeness. Yet here again, Probst expands the tradition by using multiple images, toppling the ideal of the one true likeness, an ideal that photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Thomas Ruff have pursued. Contrarily, Probst presents the clinical evidence of multiple angles, multiple selves. Her approach emphasizes not stasis and permanence—a face preserved for all of time—but fluidity and development: human physiognomy as a condition of growth and decay. This is especially apparent in Probst’s images of her family, photographed over a twenty-year period. The process, revealing children maturing into adults, exposes photography’s futile attempts to stop time while providing the artist with an endearing record of her family’s history—an expansion of the family album, as it were.
As others have noted, Probst also likes to blend genres. Close-ups are also family portraits. Portraits are foregrounded by still lifes. Still lifes become components in nudes. Fashion morphs out of street photography. Street photography swells into cinema. And each finds animus in very specific, very signifying subject matter. The fashion photographs, for example, expand beyond the typical boundaries of the singular catchy image. Exposure #124 (“the scientists”), a 2017 editorial commission for Vogue Italia, combines portrait, still life, and fashion in a way that feels both arty, homemade, and luxuriously vacant. A visual gluttony is achieved through additive measures—more props (vessels), more scale (large), more model (twins), more image (diptych). Through such excesses, Probst creates a fashion photograph that is self-referential, emphasizing its status as both a reproducible technology and an object of luxury. Moreover, the models’ confrontational gaze channels awareness of the image as a fabrication, as a flat surface designed for viewing pleasure—it is a self-aware fashion photograph with complicit models.
Yet there is something more going on in that confrontational gaze: a resistance to, or return of, objectification. In the fashion images in particular—but also the nudes—Probst implicates the viewer through different strategies. Most commonly, Probst enlists scale, sizing her multi-part prints in relation to the bodies of viewers, such that, when standing in relation to the works, the models appear “life-size.” Her models also frequently return the gaze of viewers. In Exposure #120, for example, a 2017 commission for the fashion brand Marni, Probst moves the technical apparatus of the fashion shoot onto the backdrop, placing the various cameras in the hands of the models, who do the essential work of the photographer, photographing each other/themselves. Not only are the women active in creating their own image, they are anonymous, their faces hidden behind cameras, deflecting scrutiny. Probst adopts a similar approach in the nudes by eliminating the faces of the models altogether to focus on the abstracted forms of their bare bodies. In this instance, the viewer’s gaze is frustrated by severe cropping, resulting in jumbled, illegible forms. Exposure #180 (2022), as one example, withholds the identities of the models—not even their gender is clear—offering instead the cold eye of a camera lens, present as an uncomfortable reminder of the viewer’s voyeuristic role in the photographic ensemble.
Probst’s Marni models, and others before, reference cinematic characterizations of photographers, most obviously Michelangelo Antonioni’s main character in Blow Up (1966). Cartoonishly sexist and of his time, David Hemmings’ Thomas is a walking satire of 1960s male privilege. Petulant, brazen, and at times bullying, Thomas commands his models like a petty dictator. The models, even the formidable Veruschka, tolerate him as all part of the gig. Thomas serves as a great foil for Probst, who directly quotes him in Exposure #99 (2012) in the form of a life-size effigy taped to the wall. Probst’s real protagonist is a live model in a red coat, startled and caught between the inert Thomas and a second live model who also points a camera in her direction. Seemingly trapped, our heroine nonetheless commands the scene with her fixed, intelligent gaze and strange hand gesture which suggests that she too holds a camera, albeit an invisible one. A similar heroine appears in Exposure #87 (2011), in which a live model (also wearing red) stands her ground against the penetrating stare of Daniel Craig in the role of the womanizing James Bond and a depiction of a questioning Monica Vitti. In both exposures, Probst’s live models both enact and defy objectification through subtleties of posture and attitude.
Resistant or defiant women appear throughout Probst’s oeuvre. They block the camera’s view with their hands, as in Exposure #58 (2008); they fire back, photographing those who photograph them, as in Exposure #34a (2005); they stare back, larger than life, as in Exposure #124 (2017); or they simply exist, as in Exposure #152 (2020), part of Probst’s COVID-lockdown series, taken on New York’s empty streets. But nowhere is the defiance more evident than in the exposures offering Probst herself, where she is seen to perform her complex ideas about photography. Exposure #185, taken in 2023, might be interpreted as an update of the early works featuring Probst and others jumping on Manhattan rooftops. Made during an unprecedented period of environmental stresses and rancorous politics, Exposure #185 depicts the photographer at work in a nonsensical setting, flanked by snow-covered evergreens on one side and a mashup of burning cars behind. Shooting into a mirror, Probst captures the burning cars—a still from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Week-end—yet foregrounds herself as the image’s protagonist: as the focused and intrepid photographer, hard at work documenting this strangely beautiful devastation.
Probst likely would redirect our thoughts to photography as a system of deception, fantasy and illusion—how we see can play tricks on the mind. Yet Exposure #185 emits a lot of visual noise. It feels both thrilling and familiar, like a movie or a television crime drama about a photographer. Is the work actually another meditation on Germany versus New York? Is it a comment on man’s destruction of the natural world? Or is it an assertion of agency, a vision of the audacious woman photographer (or a celluloid depiction of one)? As in all of Probst’s work, the clues don’t quite add up, leaving us to decide. Ultimately, we see what we are able to see.