Barbara Probst on her double takes
A lot of fine art photographers are snooty about fashion, but not Barbara Probst, who created the images on the previous pages. Long before she was commissioned by Marni to shoot its S/S17 campaign, and before style magazines came calling, she was paying attention to clothing. ‘I always did,’ she says. ‘I choose every piece consciously.’
Probst was born in Munich but is now based in New York. The city is central to this shoot, and much of her work, but it’s really the clothes – selected by Wallpaper’s Isabelle Kountoure and based on fashion’s current animal-print trend – that proved inspirational here. ‘The prints are quite graphic; they stand out in New York, where there can be a lot of black and dark colours.’ They suggest the primal nature of on-the-move New Yorkers. Look at the urban jungle, they say.
Probst works with a transmitter, which allows many cameras to take a picture simultaneously at the click of a button. Here, she offers two perspectives on the same instant. Viewpoints are Probst’s interest – the main subject of her work is arguably never the human or object, but the photographic moment, the second where the many shutters click. It’s a sensitive twist on Henri Cartier-bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’, and one that oddly suits today’s image-obsessed and Cctvobserved world, where movements are recorded more than ever. The format and constraints of our magazine shoot offered Probst the chance to contrast images side by side, and to document the passage of time as a reader flips on. ‘It’s very different to having the images on the wall. When you turn the pages, it’s just perfect for this idea.’
Before taking up photography, Probst studied sculpture, which is, she says, ‘very much about the point of view’. ‘It’s about space, where you are, where you stand. You can look at it from any angle. I think I’ve just never left that idea.’ In previous shoots, Probst has given the model the transmitter, allowing them to spark the multiple captures. Her work tends to undermine the notion of the photographer as the star creator, the owner of the most vital gaze. It questions what photography is and what it can be – considering not only perspective and form but broader themes of authorship, ownership and control.
‘I have thought of my work as political because it reveals the idea that we are all subjective and the way we look at things is very different and not necessarily right or wrong,’ she says. Often the second picture interferes with the narrative one constructs on viewing the first. ‘The story is about the same moment – but there are two stories, and one is not more important than the other; they have the same value. They say different things but they are all true.’∂