Exposures

More about the book

Snap, click, the sounds of the highbrow paparazzi. Barbara Probst likes to arrange for several photographers to record the same subject at precisely the same moment, with various cameras and films, from different angles and distances. In one grouping, a vibrant image of a woman in a crosswalk is accompanied by the same moment inscribed in grainy black-and-white, from above, through a window. One suggests voyeurism, another incorporates the slipshod framing of a snapshot, and the first, on reconsideration, more closely resembles a runway shot of a model on the move. These multiple exposures are more than a meditation on the event being recorded--the diversity of images points out the ways photographers direct and classify their images in the making, and brings to light the viewer's active role in reading them. Probst, born in Munich in 1964, divides her time between Germany and New York, where she was recently included in New Photography 2006 at The Museum of Modern Art.