The Marni Spring/Summer 2017 advertising campaign has freshness and vitality brought to it by the complex and sophisticated play on roles between model and photographer; where the act of photographing becomes the main subject of the image.
Using numerous cameras to take synchronised photographs from different angles, the artist Barbara Probst creates portraits of four women from various perspectives. Each of them interacts differently with the camera, to the point that they themselves become the authors of the images. A hyper realistic exchange of glances in a place that is not a place, where the profound meaning of the composition can only be appreciated when seen as a whole.
“My shoots are more like performances. The model performs and plays an equivalent role to the photographers and the cameras on tripods. There is somehow a balance of power between all the elements of the shoot, because all parts are participating in a kind of play, including the cameras documenting it. In many of my images the photographers and the cameras are visible in the pictures and become ‘models’ in their own right. Formally, they allude quite a bit to fashion photography, but they do empower the model and thereby oppose fashion photography, a genre which reveals the imbalance of power in photography in the most obvious way” – Barbara Probst
