Vera Lutter

Vera Lutter
Born 1960 (age 55–56)
Kaiserslautern, West Germany
Nationality German
Education Academy of Fine Arts, Munich & School of Visual Arts
Known for Photography
Movement Contemporary art

Vera Lutter (born in Kaiserslautern, in 1960)[1] is a New York-based artist. She works with several forms of digital media, including image projection installation, film, and sound recording. Through a multitude of processes, Lutter’s oeuvre focuses on light and its ability to create notions of time and movement within a tangible image.

Biography

Education

In 1991, Lutter received her degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich where she trained as a sculptor. Thereafter, she enrolled in the Photography and Related Media program at the (jai and brooke) School of Visual Arts in New York, earning her MFA in 1995.[1]

Work

In the early 1990s, the artist undertook her first experiments with the medium of pinhole photography. To capture a direct imprint of her environment, Lutter transformed the loft in which she lived into a camera obscura. Through the aperture of a pinhole, rather than a carved lens, an inverted image of the outside world was projected onto mural-sized sheets of photographic paper. Refraining from the reproducibility warranted by conventional photography, the artist retained the unique negative print in an effort to maintain the immediacy of her images.

Lutter’s most prominent work utilizes a room-sized camera obscura to capture large black and white negative images. The subject matter of her images varies greatly between urban centers, industrial landscapes, abandoned factories, and transit sites, such as shipyards, airports, and train stations. Many of her images present locations in and around New York, including various views of Manhattan, the Pepsi Cola sign in Long Island City, Queens, Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, and the former Nabisco factory in Beacon. Lutter has also worked internationally, making images at the Frankfurt airport, of the Battersea power station in London, Venice, and RheinBraun strip mining in Germany. More recent projects have focused on the pyramids of Egypt, the Maria Laach Benedictine Abbey in Germany, and a series of images documenting the evolution of a construction site seen from her studio window.

In advancement of her process, Lutter has incorporated her camera obscura images into architectural installation works. The first was Linger On in 2005, for which the artist printed a semi-translucent variant of her 1999 photograph of the Friedrichshafen Zeppelin onto large panels of acrylic. Later with Folding Four in One in 2009, Lutter captured views from a clock tower in Brooklyn. Situated at the highest part of the building, the interior space of the clock tower is perfectly square with each of its four sides housing a large clock face. Backed with clear glass, each clock facilitates the entrance of light while demonstrating the steady evolution of time. With a camera obscura, Lutter made exposures of four different vistas of New York onto large sheets of film emulsion. The large-scale negatives were thereafter set between pieces of acrylic and installed in a square formation, suspended between floor and ceiling. Each image depicts one cardinal view seen from the tower, offering the experience of inhabiting an alternate time and space. These installation projects not only underscore the monumentality of Lutter’s art, but also serve to reiterate the structural potential of light itself as the works become a literal part of the viewer’s environment.

Lutter first explored the possibilities of color photography with Jai Brooklyn, a project produced in 2003/2009 memorializing the civilian deaths caused by the Iraq War. The names of those lost are displayed along the bottom of a projection of rotating images of a hibiscus plant in various stages of bloom and decay.

One Day stands as Lutter’s first and most recent work in video and sound installation. For this piece, the artist made a twenty-four-hour recording in the Petit Camargue nature preserve just outside the French town of Saint-Louis. Through a fixed frame, Lutter captured a full day’s cycle with all its subtle transformations in atmosphere.

Concurrently, Lutter has pursued new avenues in digital astronomic photography with the creation of Albescent, an ongoing project chronicling the ebb and flow of the moon. Since 2010, the artist has amassed numerous images of the sun and moon from international vantage points building a travel diary that considers the ubiquitous presence of these celestial bodies.

Her two latest projects are One Day, a twenty-four hour sound and video installation, and Albescent, an ongoing photographic observation of the moon.

Exhibitions

Lutter's images have been exhibited internationally in both group and solo exhibitions, including this select list of exhibitions:

Special projects

Collections

Lutter's works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, The National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Neue Galerie New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Davis Museum, Wellesley College, among others.

Awards and nominations

References

  1. 1 2 "Vera Lutter (German)". ArtNet.com. Retrieved February 2, 2015.

Further reading

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