Vera Lutter’s most prominent work utilizes a room-sized camera obscura to capture large black and white negative images. The subject matter of her images varies greatly between urban centers, industrial landscapes, sites of transit, historical monuments, art spaces, and works of art.  

The artist’s camera obscura works are informed by her interest in the parallels between the beginnings of industrial development in the nineteenth century and the discovery of photography as a chemical process. Progressing simultaneously, both phenomena are responsible for unfathomable changes in the way we live and trade information. Investigating these parallels, Lutter finds sublime beauty within the destructive power inherent in industrial accomplishment.

Photographing not only subjects of technological advancement such as the Effelsberg radio telescope, Lutter also turns towards the past in projects depicting ancient Grecian ruins. In her more recent work, Lutter focuses in on the art world itself, making images of historic works of art, both two and three-dimensional, as well as the museum galleries and campuses in which they are displayed. In photographing all her subjects, the final works are not only inverted tonally in black and white, but also left-right, pulling the imagery into a balancing act between being representative yet also an abstraction, or an echo, of itself.

Lutter has also worked with several forms of digital media, including image projection installation, video, and sound recording. Her two projects, One Day, a twenty-four-hour sound and video installation, and Albescent, a long-term photographic observation of the moon, focus on light and its ability to create notions of time and movement within a tangible image.