Lutter, Vera
German, b. 1960
The Museum of Contemporary Photography commissioned Lutter in 2001 to turn rooms in Chicago office buildings into camera obscuras and photograph Chicago’s downtown. Chicago’s buildings have long been photographed–this vertical city on the prairie, with its blocks of abstract grids, has held great attractions for the camera–and Lutter’s pictures, with their sweeping verticals and repeated rectangles, play up these aspects. The Chicago photographs show the presence of old and new buildings, compressed into a grid of overlapping planes.
Chicago looks strange, and so does photography itself. Positive becomes negative, objects in motion disappear, and the scale of the print is much larger than the usual photograph, but has not been enlarged. In these images, we are made to realize that the techniques of photography are in no way hinged to its assumed visual conventions, and this realization should carry over to our viewing of the other pictures all around us.
-- adapted from an essay by Liz Siegel
Vera Lutter studied art at the Munich Academy (Degree 1990) and photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dia Foundation, New York; Kunsthalle, Basel; and Museum of the City of New York. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Lutter has also received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2001).
Eskin, Blake. On the Roof: Pepsi Degeneration. the New Yorker (March 29,2004), p. 40
Hetzler, Max. Vera Lutte. ARTnews (June 2002), p.131.
Wollen, Peter. Vera Lutter interview. Bomb (Fall 2003), p.46-53.