For 15 years, my studio in New York’s Garment District looked out over a parking lot. It was an inspiring sight: I’d watch the birds and the people coming and going. Then they started digging out the foundations for a high-rise. I took this shot of the work in 2011, as part of a series I called The Loss of my View. It went on for almost two years.
I’m one of the few artists left in the area. It used to be all pre-war high-rises and industrial buildings but the garment industry, like everything else in the city, has largely moved out, unable to afford the rents. The Garment District has been gentrified and “rezoned” to allow residential buildings, not just commercial ones.
To take this shot, I turned my studio into a pinhole camera, or camera obscura – which literally means “dark room”. I covered the windows in black plastic and taped a metal plate in place, one with a precisely drilled hole in it. When I open that hole the image floods in and projects itself – upside down and reversed – on photographic paper hanging on the wall opposite. It’s like watching a film. You see everything that’s happening out there, especially in bright daylight. The exposure took six days, from 9 to 15 December, because it was almost the darkest time of the year. And the image was very big: 264cm by 284cm.
I love doing camera obscura demonstrations. I’m currently working on a series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where they’ve built me a plywood box on wheels. I roll it around the museum campus photographing its architectural aspects. The box is the size of a shipping container and sometimes staff members come inside to look at a projected image – but not while I’m actually making a photograph.
I have to be alone when I work. I need to concentrate. I tuck myself up beneath the pinhole, watching the cone of light widen out from that tiny point. In a longer exposure, I go inside every other hour. In shorter ones – anything up to six hours – I stay inside for the duration, since the image develops quickly and I need to manipulate the light, obstructing certain parts now and again. The edges take longer than the centre. If I don’t do it right, it’s all screwed up.
It is a pretty amazing technique. I started experimenting with it when I first moved to New York in 1993, turning my loft into a camera and photographing this city that was so new to me. These days, when I’m working outdoors I use adapted shipping containers. That’s how I shot London’s decaying Battersea Power Station in 2004 and, more recently, the vast Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany with its 100m-diameter dish.
The longer the exposure, the more you can observe everything you’re shooting. At this construction site, you can see the ghostly image of a truck. It stood at the base of the crane long enough to leave this trace. But in other parts of the image, more movement can be detected: the dumpster in the left of the foreground was repeatedly being filled, shipped out and replaced, while white sheeting hanging from the first floor windows would billow around.
That movement was important. The image was about how my neighbourhood was changing – how a gritty urban view was transforming into a boring facade. It turned out to be such an ugly building that I didn’t do the final image. It was just too depressing.
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Vera Lutter: Turning Time is at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, until 14 April.
Vera Lutter’s CV
Born: Kaiserslautern, Germany, 1960.
Training: Academy of Fine Arts, Munich; School of Visual Arts, New York.
Influences: “Looking at all the arts – literature, music, artists.”
High point: “Being content with a work.”
Low point: “9/11.”
Top tip “Never follow a trend.”
