EXPOSURE #141 | BARBARA PROBST

Exposure #141 is part of the homonymous series undertaken by Barbara Probst at the beginning of the 2000s. As part of this great photographic tale – whose stages are identified by a progressive number – the piece moves away from the group of works devoted to portraits and approaches the more poetic and enigmatic one that focuses on details.

It is for this reason that in Exposure #141 the style of the artist is almost lost, in favor of a more narrative, and in a certain sense more inscrutable, rendering of the work: the technique of capturing the same subject from multiple angles, resorting to the use of several devices placed at different heights and distances, is functional not to arouse an immediate perturbing sense, but to direct the observer towards misleading details, apparently insignificant, and, for this reason, even more charged with a mysterious and disorienting guise.

The choice of constructing the works through the juxtaposition of two or more shots fuels their narrative component. A container juxtaposed to a mockup of a house, a lemon that acts as a counterpart to an X-ray, a jug flanked by a ruler, all united by a wooden table on which sits an anonymous body: we know nothing about that body, summarized by the vision of a leg, yet we could sew on it endless stories. The place, date and time of the sets – a constant in Barbara Probst’s work – only increase our imagination.

Barbara Probst, Exposure #141: N.Y.C., 368 Broadway, 02.21.19, 6:43 p.m., 2019
Ultrachrome ink on cotton paper
3 parts: each 137 x 91 cm
copyright: Barbara Probst / VG Bild-Kunst
courtesy: Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin

18/05/2021