The first theme that captured my attention in Barbara Probst's work is the singular way she expands our sense of time and space, challenging photography's hold on instantaneity. I use the word expand here, because I find that her work draws a direct connection to the snapshot, and thus to photography's long history of neatly slicing out seemingly fleeting moments. The Exposure series sees snapshots expanding into several positions: in capturing a subject at the same moment but from different perspectives, Probst complicates photography's usually linear relationship to time and space, adding dimension by using eye-catching colour and black and white, as well as realistic backdrops.

I chose Barbara Probst not only because of the way her work complicates photography's relationship with temporality, but also because of its self referential nature. I am drawn to work that peels back the veneer, showing just a little evidence of process, even if that's entirely fabricated. Her use of photographic equipment, backdrops used as props rather than backgrounds and the reuse of models has an almost didactic quality, allowing the viewer into her studio to understand the way she works. It feels like a signature without being too repetitive or proprietary. It's in this way that Probst achieves a balance between contributing to conventions of photography and personal style, and that balance is something I am trying to strike in my own work. 

--

I could prattle on about John Berger for hours to anyone who'd listen. But I'll try to keep my cool here. 

John Berger was an artist, writer, activist and art historian whose delightfully seventies BBC series (and subsequent book) Ways of Seeing contributed greatly to photographic theory through its rearticulation of Walter Benjamin's ideas of mechanical reproduction in art, as well as its refreshingly Marxist ands feminist approach to art history. The scope of Berger's work is sweeping, though it is primarily centred around themes of Marxist humanism, labour politics, a love of art, and a love for those who make and appreciate it. It questions the ways in which we view and display art, uncovering the ways that our experience of art has been marked by wealth and power. 

John Berger, Drawing for Mahmoud Darwish. 2008​​​​​​​

While Berger was a painter from his youth into his thirties, his most prominent work was in philosophy and art history. I've chosen to include his drawings, because I find that they illustrate one of my favourite qualities of his work: the way he uses his personal paper trail (letters to and from his daughter, poems written for friends and revolutionaries, memories shared between loved ones) to tell such multifaceted and profound stories about art. 

I find that his use of personal storytelling in art historical discourse just demonstrates a kind of care and dedication to his work that is extremely inspiring to me. Berger seemed to have gone about his daily life with an acute sensitivity to the world and all its conflict and beauty. This is reflected in his writing as he often spends pages describing a single quality of a painting, only to spend pages recollecting time spent in a place that evokes the exact feeling, somehow. It amazes me, and although his writing is expertly sharp and evocative, it still feels approachable, like we're gossiping together in a museum. I've always been looking to strike the perfect balance of the personal and universal in my work. Reading Berger's essays, it feels possible. 

--

I've included two of my favourite episodes of Ways of Seeing, 1972.