NEW ORLEANS, LA – This spring, NOMA will explore the historical and contemporary role of the photographic negative in three related presentations. Drawing mostly on its own permanent collection, NOMA will exhibit some of the earliest examples of photographic negatives in Paper Negatives and avant-garde and twentieth-century uses of the negative image in Negative Image. These two exhibitions will provide a historical context for the chief component of this spring program, a monographic exhibition on the monumental work of a contemporary photographer, Vera Lutter: Inverted Worlds.
“Since 2011, NOMA has presented a series of exhibitions that engage with the diverse histories of photography,” said Susan M. Taylor, NOMA’s Montine McDaniel Freeman Director. “This group of presentations allows us to feature alternative histories of photography as well as share key, monumental, works by a major contemporary artist with our local and regional audience.”
“The goal of these three concurrent focused exhibitions is to explore the historical importance of a function that, in an increasingly digital world, is disappearing,” said Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints and Drawings. “Once entirely vital to all photographic work, the negative is fast becoming an artifact of photography’s past.”
Vera Lutter: Inverted Worlds features twelve monumental photographs in a succinct mid-career retrospective of New York-based German photographer, Vera Lutter. In her work, Lutter elevates the role of the negative from a nearly invisible part of the photography process to the chief object of our attention. While many photographers have turned to negative-less digital processes, Lutter demonstrates the vast potential in an older form of photographic technology. The twelve photographs in the exhibition include large single-panel images, diptychs, and one triptych made between 1998 and 2014 in Italy, Germany, and the United States.
Lutter’s monumental photographs are one-of-a-kind negative prints made inside a room-sized pinhole camera with exposures that range from hours to months. Although the phenomenon of the room-sized camera (often referred to as the camera obscura) is one of the oldest known in the history of photography, Lutter’s results are anything but archaic. Incredibly detailed, tonally reversed, and laterally mirrored, her mesmerizing prints present a world that is at once recognizable and unfamiliar. Since the images are devoid of people because of the long exposures, each one presents a seamless continuum of time, each infinite moment superimposed on the others. In these images, therefore, the world neither was nor is, but is rather constantly in the process of becoming. Much like the photographs themselves, the subjects are a mix of the historic and the modern, ranging from Venetian plazas and canals, to the modern skyline of New York City, to giant radio telescopes and other feats of industrial engineering.
Vera Lutter: Inverted Worlds is presented in conjunction with Paper Negatives and Negative Image, two simultaneous displays that examine the role of the negative in the history of photography. Paper Negatives presents examples of the oldest kinds of photographic negatives: evocative chemical images on sheets of writing paper while Negative Image explores the modernist moment in which the negative image shifted from an intermediary stage to a graphic, final product in the course of experimentation with abstraction in photography.
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.
About NOMA and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden
The New Orleans Museum of Art, founded in 1910 by Isaac Delgado, houses nearly 40,000 art objects encompassing 5,000 years of world art. Works from the permanent collection, along with continuously changing special exhibitions, are on view in the museum’s 46 galleries Fridays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The adjoining Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden features work by over 60 artists, including several of the 20th century’s master sculptors. The Sculpture Garden is open seven days a week: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden are fully accessible to handicapped visitors and wheelchairs are available from the front desk. For more information about NOMA, call (504) 658-4100 or visit www.noma.org. Wednesdays are free admission days for Louisiana residents, courtesy of The Helis Foundation. (May not include special exhibitions.) Teenagers (ages 13-19) receive free admission every day through the end of 2015, courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
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