Vera Lutter

San Giorgio Venice, IV: January 15, 2008, 2008

Vera Lutter Biography

Vera Lutter (b. 1960, Kaiserslautern, Germany) trained first as a sculptor, earning her diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1991. She moved to New York shortly afterward and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, completing an MFA in photography in 1995. Rather than adopt a camera in the conventional sense, Lutter works exclusively with room-sized camera obscuras of her own construction. Using spaces such as an apartment, a shipping container, or a purpose-built chamber, she blacks out everything but a single small aperture, through which light from the outside world projects an inverted image onto the opposite wall. She lines that wall with sheets of silver gelatin photographic paper rather than film and lets the exposure run for as long as the available light requires—anywhere from a few hours to several weeks, depending on the site and conditions. Because there is no negative-to-positive step, the sheet that emerges from the camera is the finished work: a unique negative print in which tonal values are reversed from the world it recorded. She has worked this way for three decades, photographing such locations as the Pepsi-Cola sign and the old Nabisco factory near her New York home, Frankfurt Airport, Battersea Power Station in London, the pyramids at Giza, and, during a multi-year artist's residency beginning in 2017, the galleries and grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art itself—including a camera built directly into one of LACMA's painting galleries and disguised to be invisible to passing visitors. Lutter states, "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."

Lutter's photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and LACMA, among others, and her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Dia Center for the Arts, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and Kunsthaus Graz. She continues to live and work in New York.