LondonÂ’s Battersea Power Station is a familiar image in works of art and photographs, but few pictures of it have been as striking as this one.

To make her large-format photographs Vera Lutter first builds a room-sized camera obscura on site. She then allows light to pass through a tiny aperture and cast an image of the outside view on to light-sensitised paper on the back wall. A long exposure of days or weeks records not only static objects but ghostly imprints of people, machines and birds in movement. Lutter, a New York-based German artist, shows the roofless interior and skeletal structure of the power station in the process of being transformed into a development of apartments, offices and shops. What she has captured in this romantic image is the passing of the landmark buildingÂ’s old life, and the beginning of its new one.

Provenance

Acquired by vendor from Gagosian Gallery, 2005.


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