Vera Lutter facts for kids

Vera Lutter (born in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1960) is a German artist. She lives and works in New York City. Vera Lutter uses different types of digital art, like photography, projections, and video-sound installations. Her art often explores how light can show time passing and movement in a picture.

About Vera Lutter

Her Education

Vera Lutter studied art in Germany. In 1991, she earned her degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. There, she trained to be a sculptor. After that, she moved to New York. She joined the Photography program at the School of Visual Arts. She finished her studies in 1995.

How She Creates Art

In the early 1990s, Vera Lutter moved to New York. The city's bright lights and tall buildings inspired her. She started trying out pinhole photography. To capture a direct image of her surroundings, Lutter turned her home into a giant camera. This is called a camera obscura.

Instead of a regular camera lens, she used a tiny pinhole. This pinhole projected upside-down images of the outside world. These images appeared on huge sheets of special photo paper. She put the images directly onto photo paper, not film. This made unique negative prints. It helped her keep the images feeling immediate and real. This was different from how normal photos are made.

Lutter's most famous work uses a room-sized camera obscura. With it, she creates large black and white negative images. Her subjects are very different. She photographs city centers, old factories, and places like shipyards and train stations. New York City is a favorite subject. She has photographed Manhattan, the Pepsi-Cola sign, and even construction sites. She has also worked in other countries. She made images at the Frankfurt airport, the pyramids of Egypt, and in London.

Vera Lutter has also turned her camera obscura images into art installations. An installation is art that fills a space. For example, in 2005, she made Linger On. She printed a photo of a Zeppelin onto large clear panels. In 2009, she created Folding Four in One. For this, she took pictures from a clock tower in Brooklyn. The clock tower had four large clock faces. Light came through the clear glass of each clock. Lutter used her camera obscura to capture four views of New York. These large negative images were placed between clear panels. They were hung in a square shape. Each image showed a different view from the tower. This made it feel like you were in a different time and place. These projects show how big Lutter's art can be. They also show how light itself can be part of the art.

Lutter has also explored other types of photography. In her project Samar Hussein (2009), she used color images. She showed the life cycle of the Hibiscus flower. These images were projected and printed. This project remembered people who were lost in a conflict. The names of those people were shown at the bottom of the projection.

One Day is Vera Lutter's first video and sound installation. For this piece, she recorded for 24 hours. She filmed in the Petit Camargue nature preserve in France. She captured a full day's cycle. It showed all the small changes in the atmosphere.

Lutter also works with digital astronomy photography. This project is called Albescent. Since 2010, she has taken many pictures of the sun and moon. She takes these photos from different places around the world. It's like a travel diary that shows how the sun and moon are always there.

Since 2012, Lutter has been photographing famous artworks. She started at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. Then she worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She also got a special request from the Museum of Modern Art. Her resulting works are both records and new ways of seeing familiar art. Making these images can take a very long time, sometimes up to seven months. They are printed directly onto black and white photo paper. This keeps them in their negative form.

In 2017, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) invited Lutter to be their first artist in residence. The museum was planning to tear down and rebuild parts of its campus. Lutter used her room-sized camera obscura. She documented the campus, galleries, and museum collection. This project started in February 2017. It will lead to a special exhibition.

Art Shows

Vera Lutter's images have been shown all over the world. She has had both solo shows (just her art) and group shows (her art with others). Here are a few examples:

Solo Exhibitions

• (2024) Vera Lutter, MAST, Bologna, Italy.
• (2018) Vera Lutter: Turning Time, Gagosian Gallery, London, England.
• (2016) Inverted Worlds, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA.
• (2015) Vera Lutter, Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY.

Group Exhibitions

• (2018) Sun Pictures Then and Now, Photo London, London, UK.
• (2016) Photography Reinvented, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
• (2014) Now You See It: Photography and Concealment, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.
• (2012) Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Special Projects

• Painting on Paper: Vera Lutter's Old Master Photographs, Residency, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. (2017–2018)
• Ariadne Unhinged, Gotham Chamber Opera, New York, NY. (2008) - Lutter designed the sets for this opera.

Where Her Art Is Kept

Vera Lutter's photographs are part of many museum collections. These are permanent collections, meaning the art stays there. Some of these places include:

• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
• The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA
• National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Awards and Honors

Vera Lutter has received several important awards for her work:

• Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. (2002)
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. (2001)
• Artist-in-Residence, International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPS). (2001)
• Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Grant. (1993)