VERA LUTTER

b. 1960 in Kaiserslautern, Germany

Lives and works in New York, USA

 

Inspired by the architecture and light of urban and industrial landscapes, sites of transit, historical and contemporary monuments, and art spaces around the world, Vera Lutter employs unique camera obscuras to produce one-off, large-scale, black-and-white negative photographs.

 

Lutter was born in 1960 in Kaiserslautern, Germany. She graduated in 1991 from the department of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and received her MFA in 1995 from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Experimenting with ways to capture the most direct possible impression of her surroundings, Lutter converted the room in which she was then living into a pinhole camera, thereby transforming it into an apparatus for recording its own appearance. Establishing an enduring guideline of altering her images as little as possible after their initial creation, she decided to retain the negative view her process generated and refrain from creating multiple versions or reproductions.

 

In subsequent works, Lutter began to explore her interest in the correspondences between nineteenth-century industrial development and the discovery of photography as a chemical process, overlapping phenomena that still exercise a far-reaching influence on everyday life and communication. Continuing to investigate these parallel histories, she identified a particular beauty in the monumental appearance and destructive potential of mechanical technology. Since the early 1990s, her New York base has also been a recurring subject. In her images of the city, ordinarily stable features such as buildings and streets are in a state of constant renewal. In Times Square, New York, V: July 31, 2007 (2007), for example, she depicts an iconic location with an ever-changing appearance and context, encompassing the rapid and ongoing reimagining of the contemporary metropolis.

 

Lutter constructs her cameras from a diverse collection of darkened chambers that has ranged from steamer trunks to shipping containers. Hanging photosensitive paper on their back walls, opposite a lensless aperture, she uses long exposure times that span from hours to several months. The resulting shots picture their subjects as ghostlike luminous traces, with impossibly dark skies and the shadowy recesses of buildings transformed into brilliant white flares. Fragments of Time Past, featured photographs of Attica’s ancient architecture, together with images of the Greek temples of Paestum, Italy, and of classical statues housed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Embracing her medium’s durational aspect, Lutter revealed the beauty of these antique subjects in a strikingly contemporary way.

 

Lutter has also employed digital media, including audio, video, and projected installation. One Day (2011), her first audio and video work, is a fixed-frame video recording of a landscape in the Petite Camargue Nature Reserve in French Alsace. Over a full twenty-four hours, it reveals how slow, subtle changes in ambient light and sound define our experience of time and place. Albescent (2010–12), a photographic observation of the moon, focuses on light and its ability to articulate ideas of time and motion within a static image or images. Taking both analog and digital photographs of the moon’s different phases from locations around the world, Lutter produced a kind of travel diary that reflects the ubiquitous presence of this celestial body. A departure from the artist’s camera obscura work, the project continues her exploration into the origins of light and its essential role in shaping perception. From February 2017 to January 2019, Lutter undertook a residency at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, producing a body of work examining the institution’s architecture and collection that was exhibited there as Museum in the Camera (2021).

 

Vera Lutter’s photographs have been exhibited at Dia: Beacon and Dia: Chelsea, New York; Kunsthalle, Basel; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Neue Galerie and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.