Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to offer its first solo exhibition of the large-scale camera obscura images by Vera Lutter. Born in Germany, she resides in New York. Lutter’s work is currently on view at Dia Center for the Arts through the 18th of June 2000.
Using the architecture of the camera obscura as her photographic mechanism, Lutter becomes the transcriber of outer architectures, facing buildings and industrial sites. Interested in places which reference particular historical moments or which have adopted an iconic stature, she transforms rooms which look upon her pending subjects into cameras, often inhabiting them during the length of each exposure. Her images often reference movement over the hours or sometimes weeks of each exposure’s duration; in so doing she speaks to the transitory nature of the built environment itself. The photographs display the microcosms of sites that are built and become altered over a course of time.
Lutter considers the original transcription of each place, which is created within the camera obscura, as its ultimate representation. She chooses this, rather than using the rendered negative as an intermediate to an ultimate positive. Her only amendment is to right each image, flipping it from its original, inverted recording. The images give a visceral sense of what it is to see the way a camera does.
