Vera Lutter facts for kids

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

About Vera Lutter

Her Education

Vera Lutter first studied to be a sculptor. She earned her degree in 1991 from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich in Germany. After that, she moved to New York. There, she studied photography at the School of Visual Arts. She finished her master's degree in 1995.

How She Creates Art

In the early 1990s, Vera Lutter started experimenting with a special type of photography. She was inspired by the bright lights and buildings of New York City. She turned her own apartment into a giant camera. This was a camera obscura, which is like a dark room with a small hole.

Instead of a normal camera lens, she used a tiny pinhole. This pinhole projected upside-down images of the outside world onto large sheets of photo paper. She put the images directly onto the paper, not film. This made each picture a unique negative print. It was different from regular photography, which makes many copies.

Using a Room-Sized Camera

Vera Lutter is famous for using a room-sized camera obscura. This helps her create large black and white negative images. She photographs many different things. These include city centers, old factories, and places like shipyards, airports, and train stations.

New York City is a common subject in her art. She has captured views of Manhattan and the Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens. She also photographed Ground Zero and a former factory in Beacon, New York. She even documented a construction site from her studio window.

Vera Lutter has also worked in other countries. She has taken pictures at the Frankfurt airport in Germany. She also photographed the pyramids of Egypt, the Battersea power station in London, and Venice, Italy.

Art Installations

Vera Lutter has also turned her camera obscura images into large art installations. In 2005, she created Linger On. For this, she printed a photo of a Zeppelin onto big clear panels. Her art often shows city scenes, like her Venice Portfolios from 2007.

In 2009, she made Folding Four in One. She took pictures from a clock tower in Brooklyn. The clock tower had four large clock faces with clear glass. Light came through these, showing time passing. Lutter used her camera obscura to capture four different views of New York. These large negative images were then placed between clear panels. They were hung in a square shape, from the floor to the ceiling. Each image showed one view from the tower. This made it feel like you were in a different time and place. These projects show how big her art can be. They also show how light itself can be a part of the art.

Exploring Color and Video

Vera Lutter has not always used only the camera obscura. In 2009, she worked on a project called Samar Hussein. This project showed the names of people who died in the Iraq War. It also included printed and projected color images of Hibiscus flowers. The flowers were shown at different stages of their life.

Her first video and sound art piece is called One Day. For this, she recorded a full 24 hours in a nature preserve in France. She used a fixed camera to capture all the small changes in the atmosphere throughout the day.

Since 2010, Lutter has also been taking pictures of the sun and moon. This project is called Albescent. She takes these pictures from different places around the world. It's like a travel diary that shows how the sun and moon are always there.

Photographing Artworks

In 2012, Vera Lutter started photographing other works of art. She began at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. Then she worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. More recently, she was asked to photograph art for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Her pictures are both records and new ways of seeing famous artworks. It can take up to seven months to make these images. They are exposed directly onto black and white photo paper, staying 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 to document the museum's buildings, galleries, and art collection. This project started in February 2017 and ended with an exhibition in 2020.

Art Shows and Collections

Solo Exhibitions

Vera Lutter's art has been shown all over the world. Here are some of her solo shows:

• (2024) Vera Lutter, MAST, Bologna, Italy.
• (2018) Vera Lutter: Turning Time, Gagosian Gallery, London.
• (2016) Inverted Worlds, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA.
• (2015–2016) Inverted Worlds, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX.
• (2015) Vera Lutter, Gagosian Gallery, New York.
• (2011) Egypt, Gagosian Gallery, London, UK.
• (2009) Samar Hussein, Carolina Nitsch Project Room, New York.
• (2005–2006) Vera Lutter, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX.
• (2004) Vera Lutter: Battersea, Gagosian Gallery, London.
• (2002) Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.
• (1999–2000) Time Traced: Vera Lutter and Rodney Graham, Dia: Chelsea, New York City.

Group Exhibitions

She has also been part of many group shows:

• (2018) Sun Pictures Then and Now: Talbot and his Legacy Today, Photo London, London.
• (2017) Painting on Paper: Vera Lutter’s Old Master Photographs, TEFAF, New York.
• (2016–2017) Photography Reinvented, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
• (2014) Now You See It: Photography and Concealment, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• (2012) Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago.
• (2011) Legacy: Photographs from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
• (2009) elles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
• (2002) 2002 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Special Projects

• Painting on Paper: Vera Lutter's Old Master Photographs, Residency, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. (2017–2018)
• Ariadne Unhinged, Gotham Chamber Opera, New York. (2008)

Where Her Art Is Kept

Vera Lutter's photographs are part of many important art collections around the world. These include:

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

Awards She Has Won

Vera Lutter has received several 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)