Erie Basin, Red Hook, VI: September 17, 2003

Erie Basin, Red Hook, was built in 1864 and, as the most important port in the world for grain, demonstrated the dominance of the Brooklyn harbour in the years before World War II. The long-standing industry that helped shape the landscape of the city’s waterfront has today virtually disappeared, leaving abandoned remains such as Erie Basin.

Vera Lutter looks back to the origin of photography in her use of the Camera Obscura technique – developed in Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries – to create a monumental vision of this industrial site. She has revived and adapted the process by using a dark space the size of a shipping container rather than the traditional small box. Through a pinhole aperture, the outside world floods the interior of this space and projects an inverted image onto the opposite wall. Exposing directly onto wall-size sheets of photographic paper, she obtains ghostly, very large-scale, tonally reversed black and white images. Her exposures can extend over several hours, or months, capturing traces and movement of time. Through her work, Vera Lutter explores the complexity of photography, focusing on the role of light as a translation of time and memory.