I was disappointed that I cold not find the images mentioned in “The Room and I” by Vera Lutter. Perhaps this is because the images are so large and difficult to digitize, not all of them exist in digital form. Perhaps this is also because the artist would like for people to see the images in real-life, imposing on the space the viewer is in. I did find this picture, however:
Vera Lutter, Studio, XIV: July 25 – September 30, 2004.
This image struck me in particular because of the way the negatives are transformed into positives and how that melts the line between negative and positive. Thus far, in my own work, there has been a clear divide between negative and positive: the negative is only a tool to get to the positive. For Vera Lutter, that seems to be not true: in most of her images, the negative is the final image. This also seems to change the role of the image as the word uttered by nature, by photons, back into something subjective and human-created. Nature draws the positives, but we capture the negatives.
What happens to our perception of an image when we consider it to be human-created as opposed to nature’s work? Does the image suddenly become more beautiful because we understand that humans created it and it was not an accident? Or do we like it less because we are reminded that we are being manipulated by the person behind the camera?
4.341 INTRO TO PHOTOGRAPHY AND RELATED MEDIA 