Vera Lutter

Vera Lutter

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German-born Vera Lutter received her MFA in Photography and Related Media in 1995 from the School for Visual Arts in New York. Trained in Munich as a sculptor, Lutter was inspired upon arriving in New York City by its urban chaos and industrial landscape. Her attempt to capture the current of the city became her first experiment with the camera obscura, as she essentially transformed her loft into a large pinhole camera. As the artist describes, "Through the windows, the outside world flooded the space inside and penetrated my body…the space, the room inside which I had this experience, would become the container to transform that very experience." The artist inhabits her room-size cameras while her unique negatives develop, a process which can last anywhere from hours to weeks.

Lutter's photography focuses on architectural or industrial landmarks and places with iconic resonance, from the abandoned Pepsi Cola Factory in Long Island City to the now defunct Battersea Power Station in London. Her depiction of these structures emphasizes their formidable stature while personifying their melancholic solitude and isolation. A haunting quality and ethereal tones dominate Lutter's images, reflecting the passing of time and signifying both the transient and the perpetual. Fleeting moments become nearly invisible, their traces overshadowed and erased by the immutable, massive structures that remain, but whose ultimate destruction is as inevitable as the continuing progression of modernism itself.

Vera Lutter's photographs have been exhibited at Dia: Beacon and Dia: Chelsea, New York; Kunsthalle, Basel; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Neue Galerie and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.