Sight Scene: Barbara Probst's 'Exposures'

Map It:  Dupont Circle 

NOW YOU SEE HER, now you see her again. And again. In "Exposures," a show of new work at G Fine Art on 14th Street NW, photographer Barbara Probst uses timers and tripods to be two, three, even five places at once.

Her images are deceptively simple. Take Exposure #46: NYC, 555 8th Ave., 10.09.06, 8:23 p.m. (2006), pictured above — with the title alone, Probst has given the viewer everything but the GPS coordinates of the image: location, date, and time. It's a familiar Realist strategy, one Flaubert described as the use of "only the facts of an irrefutable and consistent truth."

The photographs themselves form another set of coordinates — different angles and strategies used to construct the complete piece. In some pieces, Probst shoots so that these coordinates (that is, each photo) only make sense in relation to one another. The orange in the color photograph is explained as a dress in the black-and-white photograph. The face in the first panel, obstructed by the model's hand, is revealed in the third panel. And the obstruction in that panel owes to the cluster of images in the middle shot. The three elements of the piece inform one another.

Even irrefutable truths don't give us facts. Donald Rumsfeld phrased it most recently when he jabbered about known unknowns, but it dates as far back as the wise men and the elephant. What can a viewer take away from the individual images in Probst's pieces? In Exposure #48: Munich, Minerviusstrase 11, 01.06.07, 3:17 p.m. (2007), at left, the slight angles on the same portrait reveal two very different individuals. It's an accurate record of a woman (the German artist's niece, in fact) taken at 3:17 p.m. — but the slight remove of the camera in the image on the right is enough to reveal a concern, a concentrated angst fixed in the woman's eye (the one obstructed by the brunette strand of hair). But that isn't the right impression at all — ask the woman on the left with the calm, blank stare.

Exposure #44: Barmsee, Bavaria, 08.18.06, 4:37 p.m. (2006) is more playful: a triptych, rather than a diptych. The woman breezing by the camera on the left is running in front of a photographic backdrop (which the viewer will find in the action in the right-hand photograph). In this elaborately staged photograph, it's the boy seated by the lake, with orange overwear and bicycle and buddy nearby, that draws the eye. As if they'd wandered off, bored with the staging and participation, the kids don't appear in the other images.

That said, the unreliable nature of photography is not a new concept by any means. The angle Probst manages on this well-covered subject is simplicity: There's no artifice at all, whether by Photoshop or elaborate lighting or conceptual trickiness. The titles of Probst's works back them up, as if she were challenging the viewer to double-check the pieces themselves. Go ahead, they're all there, she's saying. It's true — but the thing is, there's actually no there there beyond what the photographer makes.

» G Fine Art, 1515 14th St NW Suite 200; 202-462-1601; Gallery hours: Tues- at 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; "Exposures" runs through May 19. (Dupont Circle)