In conjunction with the opening of Vera Lutter: Inverted Worlds, internationally renowned artist Vera Lutter presents a lecture on her work over the past ten years, exploring her unusual technique and her fascination with the subjects that she depicts in her monumental photographs. On Tuesday, April 19, Vera Lutter will give a lecture on her work in the Stern Auditorium. This program is included with museum admission.

Vera Lutter elevates the current role of the negative from a nearly invisible part of the photography process to the chief object of our attention. Lutter’s photographs are one-of-a-kind negative prints made inside a room-sized pinhole camera with exposures that range from hours to days.

As photography moves further into the digital realm, photographs are increasingly an immaterial phenomenon, and the negative as an object is fast becoming a relic of photography’s past. In an inversion of this progression, Vera Lutter (German, born 1960) returns photography to its roots, using traditional processes and the simplest form of the camera in exceptional ways to create monumental works that emphasize the material qualities of the photograph and demonstrate the visual complexity of the negative image. Lutter transforms entire rooms, shipping containers, or purpose built boxes into enormous pinhole cameras. She affixes photographic paper to one of the walls inside the camera and then waits for the very faint traces of light coming in through a lens to imprint on the paper. The exposure times range from three hours to three months, and the final product is a unique, immense but elegant negative print that inverts the world—light is dark, dark light, and left is right, and right left—making the familiar strange and inviting us to consider how we perceive our surroundings.

Vera Lutter: Inverted Worlds is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in association with the New Orleans Museum of Art. The New Orleans presentation is sponsored in part by Milly and George Denegre and Adrea Heebe and Dominick Russo. Additional support is provided by Dr. Siddharth K. Bhansali.

Image: Vera Lutter, Clock Tower, Brooklyn, XI: June 1, 2009, Unique gelatin silver print, 98 5/8 x 98 7/8 inches, Collection of the artist, courtesy Baldwin Gallery © Vera Lutter. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery