The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of the photograph San Marco, Venice, XIX: December 1, 2005 by Vera Lutter. To reinterpret an iconic city, the photographer used the same optical device that once aided Venetian artist Canaletto: a camera obscura. A room or a box with a pinhole, a camera obscura projects a view of the outside world onto one interior wall, enabling either an exact drawing or a photographic print.

Born in Germany, Lutter studied at the Munich Art Academy before pursuing an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts, which she received in 1995. She has been awarded several grants, including a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, and has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and Dia:Beacon. Represented by Gagosian Gallery and Galerie Max Hetzler, Lutter lives in New York but photographs around the world.

Originally rooted in conceptual art, Lutter changed course by happenstance in 1993. Light filtering into her Manhattan loft entranced the artist, and, besotted with the view of her new city, she constructed an aperture and her first live-in camera. What was meant to be a one-time experiment became an endless preoccupation, and Lutter has remained monogamous with her antiquated technology. The method allows her to take days-, weeks-, or months-long exposures, which she then develops and leaves as irreplaceable negatives.

During the exposure, objects inevitably shift and leave ghostly traces. For Zeppelin Friedrichshafen, I: August 10-13, 1999, Lutter sat in her shipping-crate camera while the airship twice left and returned. What remains is half-hanger, half-zeppelin, and, as in many of Lutter's works, an enigmatic no-man's-land. Other subjects have included the strip-mined wastelands of Rheinbraun, Germany, an abandoned power station in Battersea, England, and the relocation of NYC's defunct Pepsi Cola factory sign. Like plaster casts, Lutter's images, with their sense of vacancy, take a moment to decipher — and like paintings, they are vulnerable during formation, and ultimately unique.