Vera Lutter – Representing the Passage of Time

Vera Lutter (b. 1960, Kaiserslautern, Germany) began experimenting with camera-less photography in the 1990s as an art student in New York. She turned her apartment into a pinhole camera, in which a small light hole in a dark room projected an upside-down image onto the opposite wall. Lutter made hour-long exposures of the cityscape outside her window on large sheets of photographic paper. Since then, she has used the same technique to capture urban and natural landscapes, industrial sites and historic buildings. In the photograph Temple of Athena, Paestum IV: October 7, 2015, the ancient temple appears against a dramatic black sky. The title indicates both time and place: the Temple of Athena in Paestum, a city now in Italy but once a Greek settlement, captured on 7 October 2015.

Pinhole camera technology requires long exposure times that can last hours, weeks or even months. To enable this time-consuming process, Lutter uses shipping containers as mobile pinhole cameras, set up in different locations. Each image is unique and cannot be reproduced, as it is created directly on the photosensitive paper without a negative. She describes her method as “pre-photographic”, as a counterbalance to the conventional reproducible photography to which we are accustomed. She strives not only to represent an object or a place, but to embody the passage of time itself during the creative process. This dimension is also reflected in the changing landscapes and buildings she documents.