Clock Tower, Brooklyn, XXXVI: June 16, 2009

Vera Lutter employs the most basic optical principle dating to the genesis of photography—the camera obscura, literally “dark room.” This monumental and mysterious photograph is a one-of-a-kind print made inside a specially constructed box—an enormous pinhole camera—she built inside the Brooklyn Clock Tower. Lutter’s photograph through the clock face to the city below presents an eerie alternate universe: tonally reversed, laterally mirrored, and devoid of people because of its long exposure. At the very moment when analog negatives are disappearing from photographic practice and process, Lutter finds new magic in the bedrock phenomenon and traditional materials of her medium.