Vera Lutter

Who is Vera Lutter?

Vera Lutter, born in Kaiserslautern, in 1960, is a New York-based artist.

Lutter’s most prominent work utilizes a room-sized camera obscura to capture large black and white negative images. The subject matter of her images varies greatly between urban centers, industrial landscapes, abandoned factories, and transit sites, such as shipyards, airports, and train stations. Many of her images present locations in and around New York, including various views of Manhattan, the Pepsi Cola sign in Long Island City, Queens, Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, and the former Nabisco factory in Beacon. Lutter has also worked internationally, making images at the Frankfurt airport, of the Battersea power station in London, Venice, and RheinBraun strip mining in Germany. More recent projects have focused on the pyramids of Egypt, the Maria Laach Benedictine Abbey in Germany, and a series of images documenting the evolution of a construction site seen from her studio window.

The artist also works with several forms of digital media, including image projection installation, film, and sound recording. Her two latest projects are One Day, a twenty-four hour sound and video installation, and Albescent, an ongoing photographic observation of the moon. Through a multitude of processes, Lutter’s oeuvre focuses on light and it’s ability to create notions of time and movement within a tangible image.