About
Sometimes, we have a moment—when we’re in the middle of, say, Times Square, or Grand Central Station, or on the subway during rush hour—when the city feels like infernal chaos. But on another day, you will have a moment where you wake up and see the absolutely beautiful, fluid, and harmonic ballet of different creatures and forces moving around. That’s the energy I like to capture…
—Vera Lutter
Gagosian New York is pleased to present recent photographs by Vera Lutter.
Inspired by New York’s light, architecture, and perpetual state of flux, Lutter turned to photography in the early 1990s as a means to record the continuously changing cityscape. To capture an immediate and direct imprint of her surroundings, she transformed her apartment into a large pinhole camera, employing the space that contained her personal experience as the apparatus that would document it. Through a simple pinhole, instead of an optically carved lens, the city outside flooded the interior of the room and projected inverted images onto wall-size sheets of photo-sensitive paper.
Modifying shipping containers and empty rooms to create site-specific camera obscuras, Lutter has since applied her technique to subjects across the world: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the Egyptian pyramids, a coal mining site near Hambach, Germany, the acqua alta of Venice. Her exposures can take days, weeks or months to produce an image; she retains the negative form as the final, unique work—a literal reflection of space and time as determined by the immediate visual environment, with the most stable and permanent features (buildings, streets) as spectral foci. In New York, which remains a central inspiration for her photographic work, these elements are in a state of constant renewal and becoming.
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Vera Lutter: On New York
Vera Lutter sat down with Marvin Heiferman, an independent curator and expert in photography, to discuss her latest New York exhibition.
Vera Lutter: Time Travel
Jean Dykstra reports on Vera Lutter’s new series, produced on the occasion of a commission to photograph Athens.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2022
The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).
Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera
During a two-year residency at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2019, Vera Lutter documented the museum’s changing campus and permanent collection, using her distinctive photographic technique. Here, she speaks about the experience with the museum’s director, Michael Govan.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2020
The Spring 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #412 (2003) on its cover.
In Conversation
Vera Lutter
Vera Lutter speaks with Gagosian’s Derek Blasberg about her Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibition, using a shipping container as a camera, and her place in photography as we enter a digital age.