Barbara Probst

“There may be quite a few images in my work that could be film stills but I haven’t yet been tempted to make a film myself. I am more interested in still images than in moving ones. The still shows an instant frozen from the continuum of life normally hidden from our eyes. In this sense, photography is antipodal to life. Film is closer to life since it has a chronological flow and it provides a narrative. A photographic image is not narrative by nature. It is, instead, more like the appearance of an event at a certain moment, without information about what happened before and after. Only the viewer’s mind brings the narrative to a photograph, reading and imagining, more or less consciously, its before and its after. In my work, I engage in these narratives in the viewer’s mind. I am trying to unhinge them, to challenge their solidity by provoking the viewer to negotiate his or her way through the dilemma of several diverging narratives. I am much more interested in the analysis of narrative in photography than in its fabrication in film.”  

Barbara Probst in conversation with Frédéric Paul, published in “Barbara Probst”, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013