PHOTO: Vera Lutter

Vera Lutter uses one of the oldest optical technologies still in use, that of the camera obscura. Before the invention of photography, it was known that if light traveled through a tiny hole into a darkened room, an image of the external world (off which the light rays had reflected) would re-form upside down on a wall opposite the tiny opening. By building room-sized cameras and placing unexposed photo paper across from a pinhole opening, Lutter has adopted the camera obscura as her singular working method, resulting in photographs with an ethereal, otherworldly beauty.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Vera Lutter in her solo exhibition “Fragments of Time Past” shows photographs of Attica’s ancient architecture, together with her images of the Greek temples of Paestum, Italy, and of classical statues housed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In response to an editorial commission from the New York Times Magazine, Lutter visited the Acropolis and Plato’s Academy in Athens, and the Temple of Poseidon in Cape Sounio in August 2021, braving the extreme heat and wildfires that threatened Greece that summer. Given the lengthy exposure times of her photographs, individuals passing through the sites have left no visible traces in the images, while the blurring of windswept trees contrasts with the unchanging solidity of the architecture. Employing the durational aspects of her medium—as opposed to the theoretical instantaneity of “the decisive moment”—and eschewing darkroom manipulation or digital alteration, Lutter engages with the fundamentals of photography. The scale, physicality, and temporality of her process create images that transform these ancient subjects, revealing their beauty in unprecedented, strikingly contemporary ways. To make her works, Lutter shoots with lensless pinhole cameras that she constructs with darkened chambers that range from steamer trunks to shipping containers and empty rooms. Hanging photosensitive paper on their back walls, she uses long exposure times that extend from hours to months. The resulting images are unique: direct imprints of her subjects’ luminous traces that are tonally reversed negatives, with impossibly dark skies and the shadowy recesses of buildings transformed into brilliant whites. Lutter’s fascination with time has led her to locations ranging from contemporary cityscapes to ancient sites. Her images are meditations on the history of human creativity and the endurance of built structures. When producing photographs of Paestum’s Doric temples in 2015, Lutter used a large shipping container as her camera, making expansive images in keeping with the scale of the monumental architecture. The images of classical temples are complemented by photographs of Greek and Roman sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012–13) that picture individual statues and collections of smaller works in a vitrine, capturing both the antique fragments and the surrounding exhibition spaces. These works relate to those featured in Lutter’s most recent institutional exhibition, Museum in the Camera at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021), which featured large-scale photographs she made of its architecture, galleries, and collections during her two-year residency there. Trained as a sculptor, Vera Lutter studied at the Kunstakademie in Munich before receiving a Master of Fine Arts in 1995 from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Contemplating the city led her to capturing its energy, light and architecture through the most primitive photographic technique: the pinhole camera, or camera obscura, which led to her recognition. She “dramatised” the device by transforming a room in her apartment, and later, containers or construction trailers, into vast photographic chambers, covering the walls with light sensitive paper. The light emitted by the elements of the urban landscape is projected through the narrow hole of these unique pinhole cameras. In these shots taken at various the exposure time of the sensitive surface can vary from a few hours to several weeks, depending on the outdoor conditions. The only material evidence of these photographic “performances” are the negative images, which are thus unique pieces.

Photo: Vera Lutter, Temple of Nettuno, Paestum: October 24, 2015, unique, silver gelatin print, 14 x 25 1/4 inches (36 x 64 cm), © Vera Lutter, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens, Greece, Duration: 7/4-28/5/2022, Days & Tours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, https://gagosian.com