PHOTO: Vera Lutter-Spectacular, An Exploration Of Light

Vera Lutter is well-known for her unique photographs representing scenes of architecture, transportation and industry, created with one of the earliest photographic devices: the camera obscura. When the image is developed (after an exposure process of several hours, days or weeks) it is a black and white negative assuming precise yet mirage-like perspectives. By showing familiar venues like Venetian architecture, urban sites of Manhattan, or Egypt’s great pyramids, the images are immediately recognisable but the inversion of tones and the passage of time captured induce uncanny presences that invite a closer observation.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fondazione MAST Archive

Vera Lutter in her solo exhibition “Spectacular- An Exploration Of Light” showcases 20 large-scale works, unique pieces distinguished by the special techniques used in their creation. These works come from museums and private collections and are accompanied by an installation and a series of largely unseen materials that document the photographer’s creative process. The exhibition is arranged in a way that offers the visitor a panoramic overview of her entire career. Vera Lutter initially trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich before moving to New York in the mid-1990s to study at the School of Visual Arts. It was there that she discovered her passion for photography, developing a unique process that harkens back to the origins of the medium. Her works are created using a camera obscura and require very long exposure times, which means they cannot capture objects that move quickly within the field of view. They are negative images and unique pieces that cannot be reproduced. Large camera obscuras, often the size of an entire room, are specially set up in front of the subjects, where they remain for exposure times ranging from a few minutes to months at a time depending on the size of the pinhole and the light conditions.The artist physically enters in the camera obscura, effectively becoming an inhabitant of the camera, which transforms into an architectural artefact. This process results in large-format prints made with the largest sheets of photosensitive paper available on the market, impressed directly inside the darkroom. As curator Francesco Zanot explains, these works are “Spectacular, without any inference of ostentation,” “but due to the fact that they focus on the experience of the public, transporting it into a dimension that transcends the ordinary. The subjects of Vera Lutter’s images (buildings, machines, industrial objects, and the very devices used to represent them) are monumental and timeless. Her work features sites such as the Hambach coal mine, one of the largest in the world; Battersea Power Station in London, the largest brick building in Europe; the Zeppelin, the largest flying machine ever built; and the Effelsberg radio telescope, which has a record diameter of 100 metres. She also captures sites such as the Pepsi Cola factory on Long Island, and various airports and shipyards in the USA and Europe, both active and disused. Occasionally, the artist repurposes containers normally used in maritime and intermodal transport, modifying them to serve as darkrooms. Using this method she photographs locations such as the Rostock shipyards, among the largest in Europe, and operational since the end of the 18th century. Her works often challenge the boundaries of space and time, serving not only as impeccable reproductions, but also genuine apparitions. Vera Lutter’s multidimensional photographs transcend the surface of reality. 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. 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. 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.

Photo: Vera Lutter, Courtesy the artist and Fondazione MAST

Info: Curator: Francesco Zanot, Fondazione MAST, Via Speranza 42, Bologna, Duration: 11/10/2024-6/1/2025, www.mast.org/