Since moving to New York in 1993 Vera Lutter has been working in her own unique medium with pinhole camera, and camera obscura.
Lutter graduated from the NY Academy of Fine arts in 1995 with an MFA in photography. While living as a student Lutter transformed her small NY loft into one of histories oldest type of cameras – the camera obscuraand through a pinhole lens that documented the urban landscape of New York in negative images. She would project these negatives on massive sheets of photographic paper.
Lutter moved on from there to more ambitious work, taking her camera obscura everywhere from The Great Pyramids of Giza to Industrial wastelands all over the world.
Her work is recurrently eerie, transforming what she shoots into their negative seem to place these commonplace scenes of urban decay, bustling city, and construction sites into spectral images where sunspots and halos shimmer across the once familiar scenes. In looking at her work we see the world in reversed, paradoxical, and that forces us to question the solidity and reality of what we are looking at, as T.S Eliot appropriately wrote in The Wasteland: “ only a collection of broken images”
Her exhibitions have been too numerous to mention – she has had at least one a year since 1998. Her unique method of photography is haunting and beautiful. Her early work focused on New York city, confined or defined by her position Lutter transformed her location. The Sky Scrapers, World Trade Center site, and city streets; all received the camera obscura treatment. These images in the reverse force questions like are these monuments to man’s success or excess in; the paradoxical nature of her work is where the strength lies.
Then she began to travel with her method; Venice, Paris, Long Island, Egypt, all received large scale negative treatment. Looking through her lens at these iconic places, especially the pyramids, is unsettling. These phantasmal ancient monuments disquiet the viewer, as if these giant works were simply apparitions in sand, bringing to mind Shelley’s words: “Look upon my works ye mighty and Tremble”.
Lutter’s more recent works are The Metropolitan Museum of Art where she focuses on the Roman statues housed there. She takes photographs in the negative – highlighting the marble forms of ruined humans, touching on what the human form is, when removed from the context of a historical art gallery and put into the context of a fine art. Her headless Marble Statue of a Crouching Aphrodite and Marble Torso Of Eros, all seem to highlight that the human form is a collection of pieces put together by a long dead architect, and nothing more, an uncomfortable thought. Nonetheless, just because they are broken and counter to the viewers expectations does not make them any less beautiful.
Lutter also turned her camera skyward for her recent series Albescent, where she took both digital and analogue photographs of the moon in various phases with varying degrees of cloud cover. Seeing these lunar specters it is easy to see that we once worshipped the moon as some kind of terrifying antipodal goddess.
Lutter continues to disquiet gallery goers around the world, using sound and light installations, photography exhibitions and her work is part of the permanent collection at some of the worlds most illustrious museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of fine arts Huston, The San Francisco Museum of Modern art and others.
John Hutt 