Vera Lutter
Zeppelin, Friedrichshafen, V, 23-27 August, 1999 | Frankfurt Airport, IV: April 13, 2001 | Radio Telescope, Effelsberg, XII: September 9, 2013 | & more...
AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY is a very simple newsletter where I share a collection of creative expressions I enjoyed coming across.
Inspired by the architecture and light of urban and industrial landscapes, sites of transit, historical and contemporary monuments, and art spaces around the world, Vera Lutter employs unique camera obscuras to produce one-off, large-scale, black-and-white negative photographs. […]
Lutter constructs her cameras from a diverse collection of darkened chambers that has ranged from steamer trunks to shipping containers. Hanging photosensitive paper on their back walls, opposite a lensless aperture, she uses long exposure times that span from hours to several months. The resulting shots picture their subjects as ghostlike luminous traces, with impossibly dark skies and the shadowy recesses of buildings transformed into brilliant white flares.
Gagosian
Given the lengthy exposure times of her photographs, individuals passing through the sites have left no visible traces in the images, while the blurring of windswept trees contrasts with the unchanging solidity of the architecture.
Gagosian
The speed of movement has to relate to the amount of light in the environment that I am photographing. The movement either registers as a blur or inscribes itself as a ghostlike figure. For instance, I photographed zeppelins inside a hangar where they had recently started to build them again. That was also my first use of a shipping container. I placed the container inside the hangar, ran tests inside it and understood that my exposure time for the image would be four days. The zeppelin was still being tested and corrected, and one day, during my exposure, the company decided to pull it out for a test flight. During the four days of exposure, the zeppelin was flying for two days and for two days it was parked in front of my camera. When the zeppelin was gone, whatever was behind and around it inscribed itself onto the photograph, but when it was placed inside the hangar, the outline of the zeppelin imprinted itself. It was rather dark inside the hangar, so things inscribed themselves very slowly. The result was this incredible image of a translucent zeppelin, which was half hangar and half zeppelin.
Vera Lutter
