Vera Lutter

Brent Sikkema/Wooster Gardens, New York

Acquired from the above in 1998 by the present owner

Douglas Fogle and Hannake Skerath, eds., Making Strange: The Chara Schreyer Collection (New York, 2021), pp. 399 and 416

New York, Wooster Gardens, Vera Lutter, September – 1998

Vera Lutter creates her unique large photographs by transforming a room into a camera to photograph its exterior environs. Using the pre-photographic technology of the camera obscura, Lutter seals the room from light completely, except for a small aperture which admits an inverted and laterally-reversed image of the outside world. This image is projected upon the back wall of the room, exposing an oversized sheet of photograph paper. This is then processed, yielding the final print: a direct camera image, remarkable for its depth and clarity. This photograph features the iconic Pepsi Cola sign in Queens, which stood atop the company’s Long Island City bottling plant for roughly seventy years.  Lutter built the camera obscura behind the sign so that it would read correctly in the exposed image. Lutter's work is represented in numerous institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Harvard Art Museums.