Month: January 2023

Vera Lutter is an artist who works primarily with photography, specifically the camera obscura, to capture scenes of monumentality, emptiness, cities, metropolitan architecture, industrial sites, and art exhibits. It seems that she generally focuses on creating works depicting whatever she is fascinated by at the moment. Her technology specific work allows people to see art and living spaces in a new way that they can’t experience or see with their own eyes. The camera obscura negatives highlight aspects of paintings, places, and buildings that might otherwise be invisible: such as where in a place objects are most stationary in contrast to where they are in constant motion, and highlighting aspects of another artist’s composition that cannot be fully appreciated until inverted.

Vera Lutter in the Inverted Worlds gallery with her print Chrysler Building, IX: July 13, 2014.

I think it is very interesting that Lutter lives inside of her cameras while exposing the photos. She seems to have an incredible dedication to her art that can be seen in her desire to actually live and experience its creation fully. She is in no means distanced from the process, she is an intrinsic part of the process: and present at literally every step. She is willing to spend an almost inconceivable amount of time, effort, and money on making very large cameras, spending “weeks and months…planning” for a single photograph, spending days exposing photos, and even going so far as living inside the cameras for hours or days. This is truly an inspirational level of dedication to the craft, the process, and the product of artwork. Vera says it best herself: “All that matters is whether I make a good piece or not…” and I couldn’t agree more.

Vera Lutter, European Old Masters: December 7, 2018—January 9, 2019, 2018–19, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery, © Vera Lutter, digital image courtesy of the artist

-Alana Radkevich
1-31-23

Zoe Leonard: You See I am Here After all
QCQ Analysis of: “Photography, the Archive, and
the Question of Feminist Form:
A Conversation with Zoe Leonard.”
by Huey Copeland

Quotation: “Your perspective keeps changing, but your eyes are always in line with the original vantage point of the photographer (Copeland 2).”

(You see I am here after all by Zoe Leonard. Photograph by Bill Jacobson, New York.)

Comment: I feel that this quote seems to imply a sense of movement; of a journey through time and space. One’s vantage point might remain the same, but as one moves the scenery around them begins to transform, and little by little to change into a scenery entirely other than what the traveler began with. Perhaps the experience of seeing all of these postcards in this way is similar to that feeling of traveling, and seeing the world change before one’s eyes, giving a new and expanded sense of perspective.
In this way the audience can begin to understand the differences in multiple perspectives and to start to expand their thinking to encompass other points of view. It is almost a though exercise of sorts, walking through this installation and thinking about how other people look at the world.
Additionally, the collection of postcards seems to hint at another motif of travel and exploration: one’s tendency to collect things like stamps and postcards to remember the places visited and seen. Postcards are nostalgic symbols of a single point, often a climactic point, in one’s travels.

(The Culturist. Installation view, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2008. Collection of the artist. courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photograph by Bill Jacobson, New York.)

Question: What similarities exist between the subjects of the postcards? Are they picked at random, or was there more intentionality involved in the decision making process? If so, how does that influence the meaning of the art and the potential interpretations of the viewers?

(image: google.co.uk photographer unknown)

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