There may be only three works in Barbara Probst’s show, but one – Exposure #1: N.Y.C., 545 8th Avenue, 01.07.00, 10:37 p.m. (2000) – covers almost half the gallery’s wall space. The specificity of the title gives a clue as to how the piece was made. One night Probst placed 12 cameras around a Manhattan rooftop. At precisely 10.37 pm she triggered a flash, jumped into the air and, as the cameras’ shutters remained opened for 30 seconds, exposed the film. The result is a self-portrait captured from a dozen different angles and presented as a series of 12 large-scale prints, eight in color and four in black-and-white. In Exposure #24 (2003) a diptych portrays two women on the Brooklyn Bridge being photographed simultaneously as they peer into separate cameras. Exposure #25 (2003) is a variation on Exposure #1, restaging the images with multiple actors and an interior location, but similarly presented in both color and black-and-white.

Despite the fact that the photographs in each piece were taken at the identical time, they provide an astonishingly varied range of perspectives. The same people look dissimilar from image to image; clothes and settings appear to have been changed when they weren’t. The overall effect is liberating, but unsettling, like discovering that various eyewitnesses to a crime have completely conflicting accounts. Probst’s work challenges the idea that there is a single, definitive version of any event and also questions whether photography has the capacity to provide authoritative evidence. This isn’t a new line of inquiry; in fact, it’s a rather popular one right now. But Probst’s photographs convey a buoyant air of excitement nonetheless.
-Martha Schwendener