Since the late 1990s Barbara Probst has built her art from a deceptively simple premise: a single instant, recorded by several cameras released at the same moment from different positions. In her ongoing “Exposures” series, a scene yields as many as fourteen separate pictures, each fixed from its own vantage. The viewer assembles the moment without moving, holding contradictory views at once — a paradox the camera normally resolves and Probst deliberately keeps open.
This 2021 monograph, published by Hartmann Books with Kunsthalle Nürnberg on the occasion of a major solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, turns that method toward the traditional categories named in its title. Streets, fashion, nudes and still lifes are subject matter a documentary or commercial photographer might claim; Probst’s constructed viewpoints place them under conceptual pressure. The commissioned fashion pictures, made for international magazines, are included, and their reception suggests how readily the approach survives the passage into editorial work. Many of the pictures were previously unpublished.
The photography is Probst’s. The volume is edited by Kunsthalle Nürnberg, with a preface by Ellen Seifermann and texts by Probst, Brian Sholis and Harriet Zilch. Martin Küchle designed it as a hardcover in gray cardboard with silkscreen printing and a Swiss brochure binding; the book runs 112 pages at 22.5 by 32.5 centimeters and includes five foldouts among roughly eighty illustrations. German and English appear together, so the arguments surrounding the work travel with the images.
The foldouts matter, because a multi-perspective sequence needs room to be read rather than glimpsed. For a collector drawn to conceptual photography, or to work that tests where art and fashion photography divide, this is a considered document of a sustained project and its exhibition.
