I darken the room and set up the photo paper, creating something like a stage for light to act. Now, whatever happens in the world outside of the room plays out on what I created. Then I sit back and let the world unfold, and whatever happens, happens.
—Vera Lutter
Inspired by the architecture and light of urban and industrial landscapes, sites of transit, historical and contemporary monuments, and art spaces around the world, Vera Lutter employs unique camera obscuras to produce one-off, large-scale, black-and-white negative photographs.
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. In Times Square, New York, V: July 31, 2007 (2007), for example, she depicts an iconic location with an ever-changing appearance and context, encompassing the rapid and ongoing reimagining of the contemporary metropolis.
