EP 32: About this collection of twenty-four concise, theoretical, and strangely poetical writings by BARBARA PROBST in her book, Matters of Uncertainty: Thoughts on Photography and the World Behind It, 1997-2020, written during a span of twenty-four years, Hagi Kenaan reflects: “The fact that our world is replete with photographs is not just a quantitative matter. It is an indication of the present condition of the human gaze which is itself historical. Photographs are neither faithful copies of the real nor are they only frames or transparent windows through which reality shows itself. Instead, they have become intrinsic to the complex practices and routines through which we negotiate our place in the world and are part and parcel of our contemporary being in the world. They are always already at work in shaping our reality, in altering the horizons of meaning and the contexts of signification in which we experience the world, affecting our imagination, our memory, our relation to ourselves and others.” 

The essays in Matters of Uncertainty confront the artifice of photography and the underlying aesthetical considerations involved in the construction of our so-called objective realities of perception, under the distant sign of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which has become the abstract but presiding watchword of the twentieth century.

PROBST’S Matters of Uncertainty: Thoughts on Photography and the World Behind It, 1997-2020 is a bilingual English/German edition, with German translations by F.P. Boué and Tas Skorupa, with a preface by Hagi Kenaan.

BARBARA PROBST was born in 1964 in Munich, Germany, and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 2006, her work was included in New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has had many one-person exhibitions in museums, and her work is included in many museum collections, both in Europe and the United States. Books about her work have been published by Steidl, Hatje Cantz, Hartmann Books, and Editions Xavier Barral. She lives and works in New York and Munich.

First edition paperback, JUNE 2021, 136 pp., sewn, bound and printed in Italy, with a two-color cover and a black and white photograph of the author by Fabiana Viso on the frontispiece, and two black and white illustrations.