Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera

From February 2017 to January 2019, New York-based artist Vera Lutter was invited by LACMA to work in residence at the museum, creating a new body of work examining the campus architecture, galleries, and collection holdings. Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera features the compelling photographs made during her two-year residency. ​ 

Lutter uses one of the oldest optical technologies still in use, that of the camera obscura. Before the invention of photography, it was known that if light traveled through a tiny hole into a darkened room, an image of the external world (off which the light rays had reflected) would re-form upside down on a wall opposite the tiny opening. By building room-sized cameras and placing unexposed photo paper across from a pinhole opening, Lutter has adopted the camera obscura as her singular working method, resulting in photographs with an ethereal, otherworldly beauty.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website