Vera Lutter

April 24 – May 22, 1999

Andrew Roth is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new photographs by Vera Lutter. Born in Germany in 1960, Lutter will be presenting images of the sea made in Orient Point, Long Island. These works are unique paper negative prints made with a camera obscura. On view will be two large-scale mural prints measuring approximately 40 by 100 inches as well as a variety of smaller works ranging from 8 by 10 to 20 by 24 inches.

Lutter has exhibited both in New York and abroad. The seascapes presented here are somewhat of a departure, since she is best known for her urban and industrial landscapes. She has photographed extensively in and around New York, including documentation of the Pepsi-Cola signage in Long Island City, Rockefeller Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Equitable Life building. In Germany, she has been working on a project on the theme of transportation photographing in airplane hangers and shipyards.

Even prior to the invention of photography, the camera obscura was utilized by artists to aid in translating the three dimensional world onto a two dimensional plane. There were portable camera obscuras that one could take along on a journey and more formidable ones which were in essence darkened rooms (thus its name) with an opening at one end acting as an aperture. In the present exhibition, these seductive, minimal images were made from a room converted into a camera that looks out onto the Long Island Sound and the Connecticut shoreline. The aperture was a pinhole in the darkened window.

To coincide with this exhibition, we have published a catalogue with an essay by Jonathan Crary titled Newton, Crary, Lutter. Lutter’s work is featured along with color photographs by Roger Newton, which were on display at Andrew Roth from March 20 through April 17. Jonathan Crary is associate professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University. He is one of the founding editors of Zone publications and has published Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, 1991.