In “The Room and the I: The Work of Vera Lutter”, Stephan Schmidtt-Wulffen describes how in the 1990s Vera Lutter, a sculpture artist, started making camera obscura photographs in her apartment on Eighth Avenue in NYC. She exposed wall-sized pieces of photographic paper and used the window in her room as a lens. I don’t fully understand where the pinhole came through, and would like to see an image or diagram of this process as it applies to an apartment-sized camera obscura. Did Lutter black out part of her window and create a pinhole in that blacked out area?
I’m shocked by the length of exposure that some of these images required. “There is a technical reason why she is missing,” Schmidtt-Wulffen writes, “the exposure times of these images in interior spaces are so long – 27 days in the case of Studio III – that the presence of the artist is simply not registered.”
Lutter’s work, Schmidtt-Wulffen argues, is a mediation of the outside and the inside. Rather than looking at the red light district through her window, Lutter invited light and images from the outside to filter in.
A practical question: with an exposure time of 27 days, how does the photographer account for daytime vs. nighttime lighting? Would you use an average of the two extremes to calculate the exposure time?
I like the idea of reducing a camera to its component parts: a dark box, a hole that intermittently admits light, and light-sensitive paper. These three components (am I missing a fourth?) can vary in size and orientation. But all must be present in order to create an analog image.
Exhibited as a negative, each of Lutter’s works is unique. Does the irreproducibility add value?
How can we use the idea of photograph-as-sculpture to inform our work in this class?
Why is the idea of timescale so compelling in these images? I can’t help but think of ghosts.
4.341 INTRO TO PHOTOGRAPHY AND RELATED MEDIA 