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Using the pioneeric technique of the pinhole camera to construct captivating and intriguing representations of space and architecture, Vera Lutter reinvents the medium of photography and enters into a discourse on the condition of an image by generating a new approach towards both time and space. As such, Lutter’s photography reveals hidden aspects of represented objects and environments, pushing them to the edge of the unfamiliar and new, the uncanny and tamed, suspended between mobility and stillness, closeness and distance.
Positioned in a darkened room fitted with a pinhole, the artist exposes the outside scene directly onto the photographic paper. Because the resulting images are not made with a negative, they are unique and cannot be reproduced.
The photographic process reverses the tones on the paper – the sky is black, buildings are white – and it also renders the image itself inverted and upside down. As such, the unusual elaboration of the large-scale photograph activates the viewer’s perceptual qualities; it is as if its immensity invites one to inhabit seemingly ghostly environments. Physical and subjective spaces are blurred and the spectator becomes an integral part of the inside in performance. The enigma of the unusually long exposures - which due to their unexpectedness resemble the strategy of a happening - combines with questioned spontaneity of the photographic process to strengthen the unique experience of viewing Lutter’s complex work.
The arrangement of the works in the exhibition creates a narrative that guides the viewer through the uncanny reality of Lutter’s photographic world. On the conceptual level, it reflects a process of internalization typical of the artist’s approach: from a spectacular series depicting means of transportation, where tension arises from the powerful illusion of movement and a sense of arrested motion (photographs taken in the area of Frankfurt airport and the shipyards of Rostock), to troubled visions of the metropolitan spaces of New York, Chicago and Berlin, rendered in a dream-like state of suspense and broken urban narrative, through to the intriguing series of interiors - industrial, mostly run-down spaces, disturbing in their anxiety and stillness, true evidence of psychological drama. It is an image of a “collapsed space”, where estrangement and familiarity create a mental construction that goes beyond the physical experience of a space. This last series enters into conceptual discourse in an intertextual play with its own mirror reflections within the frame of the photograph, multiplying the images in an almost endless sequence of insides and returns and thus, through the aspects of structural repetitiveness and self-reflection upon the medium, referring to such minimalist and conceptual artists as Sol LeWitt and Dan Graham.
The Inside In exhibition also includes a photograph taken by Vera Lutter during her stay in Graz (using the Kunsthaus location as a pinhole camera).
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue containing reproductions of all the works and with texts by Lynne Cooke, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and Peter Pakesch, as well as a conversation with the artist by Adam Budak.
