PHOTO:Vera Lutter

‘’Sometimes, we have a moment, when we’re in the middle of, say, Times Square, or Grand Central Station, or on the subway during rush hour, when the city feels like infernal chaos. But on another day, you will have a moment where you wake up and see the absolutely beautiful, fluid, and harmonic ballet of different creatures and forces moving around. That’s the energy I like to capture…’’ Vera Lutter

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Gagosian Gallery Archive

Inspired by New York’s light, architecture, and perpetual state of flux, Lutter turned to photography in the early 1990s as a means to record the continuously changing cityscape. To capture an immediate and direct imprint of her surroundings, she transformed her apartment into a large pinhole camera, employing the space that contained her personal experience as the apparatus that would document it. Through a simple pinhole, instead of an optically carved lens, the city outside flooded the interior of the room and projected inverted images onto wall-size sheets of photo-sensitive paper. Modifying shipping containers and empty rooms to create site-specific camera obscuras, Lutter has since applied her technique to subjects across the world: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the Egyptian pyramids, a coal mining site near Hambach, Germany, the acqua alta of Venice. Her exposures can take days, weeks or months to produce an image; she retains the negative form as the final, unique work, a literal reflection of space and time as determined by the immediate visual environment, with the most stable and permanent features of buildings and streets as spectral foci. In New York, which remains a central inspiration for her photographic work, these elements are in a state of constant renewal and becoming.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, N.York, Duration: 29/1-7/3/15, Days & Hours: Tue–Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com