Deconstructing Photographers: Luxemburg, Wentworth & Lutter

When looking firstly at all three of these photographer’s work I have found they all investigate and explore urban spaces in cities from different perspective and using unique technical approaches. The individual’s work portrays scenes that we pass by every day and ignore.

Rut Blees Luxemburg, Richard Wentworth and Vera Lutter look at the mundane and by finding new ways to view these places make something normally boring quite beautiful and interesting for an audience.

Firstly the photographer, Rut Blees Luxemburg is well known for her employment of long exposures to take advantage of the light emanating from the signs and lights that frequent city streets, as well as building windows towering above the urban space.

Luxemburg works mainly after dark as she believes that the city reveals itself more to her when it is no longer part of the daily bustle of shoppers and workers; she likes how aspects of the city that are normally not observed during the day are amplified at night like shadows. Rut Blees Luxemburg wants her work to express a sense of presence not to show it as a threatening place.

To find her locations she simply wanders the streets and therefore none of her shots are ever set up but merely observed and documented. She believes, ‘Walking has this effect on the wanderer of creating a rhythm and within that rhythmic walking your mind,.. becomes more free, and in that special heightened awareness you then are able to notice places.’

The colouring in this following image was very eye-catching for me, almost glowing and radiating an artificial light imprinting the sign post shadow into the wall creating quite a flat looking image. The fact that the sign post is projected on to a very blank wall gives a sense of confusion as if someone is lost within their mind. The very tight framing is very mysterious making the audience wonder where the signs are pointing you towards and where you are in general as the wall seems to have a blocked up window hinting at absence within the area.

Time Now, Location Here, 2010

Luxemburg often makes work based on the inspiration of poet Friedrich Holderlin’s poems from the German Romantic period; she often focusses on one line and forms her theme and final image around it.

A series of work titled ‘Piccadilly’s Peccadilloes’ consists of images taken of Heathrow Airport (Terminal 4) Tube station ticket hall, commissioned to celebrate the 100^th year anniversary of the Piccadilly Line.

Luxemburg’s images in this series were mainly of reflections in the pavements of the architectural designs, this was quite a different way of looking at buildings. It is almost a metaphor for the tube, the way that you are looking at the underground related building as if it’s under ground viewed through a hole. It explores the idea of vertigo in the way that something that is usually towering above is now being submerged below the audience, bending your sense of perspective. Also by featuring the puddle, Luxemburg could be commenting on the idea of fleeting time within an urban space. While the building sits watching over city life, people are always rushing around moving forward in time and the puddle will soon be gone destroying this unique viewpoint, completely changing the view of this space.

Rut Blees Luxemburg’s image ‘Enges Bretterhaus / Narrow Stage’ 1998 is very interesting for me with the use of colour particularly.

A red container sits abandoned in a car park with a chair and table set up inside and as there is a drink carton you feel as if it has recently been frequented. The emptiness of this confined space has a sense of absence making the audience wonder who is usually sat there and why?

For my city project I have been very intrigued in the car park location and its effect on the surrounding areas therefore I found this image interesting to analyse and decipher. The way that a car park is usually a temporary housing area for a person’s car however here it is obvious that this object is quite permanent, a seating area in a car park, and therefore out of place reflected by the colouring.

The vibrant tones are out of place and is therefore very conflicting with the surrounding colour scheme often seen in Luxemburg’s work which she also draws upon when photographing neon signs which again are artificial.    

The open door feels oddly inviting as if you would be walking into someone’s personal space, again by photographing at night time the interior is in shadow contrasting with the exaggerated street lights outside. This enhances a claustrophobic feel within the space while outside sits a vast open car park, which again is what I am exploring in my own work- huge empty spaces consisting ironically or small (car) spaces amongst the busy urban expanse.    

Richard Wentworth’s main body of work explores mundane scenarios through sculpture, and therefore he uses photography to document everyday sculptures seen on the street in cities either set up or spontaneously discovered; I was particularly attracted to his on-going series of images, ‘Making do and Getting by’. Much like Luxemburg, Wentworth changes people’s perspective not on scenes but rather everyday objects.

The title itself hints at this idea of ordinary situations being captured as an art form like a piece of paper jammed in a parking meter to reserve a parking space. These scenes are momentary, never to be seen again, snapshot like; however others are more set up, recreated by Wentworth at a later stage as if they were caught absolutely by chance. It makes something that is usually quite unattractive like litter stuffed between the wall and a pole ignored by passer-bys very beautiful and eye-catching. 

The images are very close-up only focussing on the thing that Wentworth wants the audience to look at with quite a shallow depth of field, looking at how the everyday person interacts and treats the space around them. His colour palette is often very muted again reflecting the dull colour scheme in urban spaces consisting predominantly of different tones of grey and brown. His images are very obviously snapshots on the streets due to the overcast weather conditions seen in most of his images where the sky is visible; however in general his images are not overly lit which highlights muted weather conditions. 

He portrays the city as a place for littering however Wentworth looks at how people seem to disguise this habit by placing their litter on a surface or wedging it between something therefore by not chucking it on the floor they haven’t littered and aren’t ruining the environment in which they live in. In a way Luxemburg and Wentworth do similar things in their images looking at how one thing can be used as something else eg. Luxemburg uses puddles as a portal to home in on and view aspects of the city; while Wentworth looks at how humankind uses something such as a shelf as a storage area or a book as a wedge to prop something up.

Vera Lutter uses the most basic photographic device, the camera obscura to create large images of architecture in urban spaces; it was originally developed during the Renaissance to capture the surrounding world through drawing and painting as we discovered when watching ‘Omnibus: David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge’ during a workshop. 

She produces black and white photographs of cityscapes captured by transforming a room into a pinhole camera obscura, exposed for long periods of time like Luxemburg’s images taking advantage of the light however Lutter’s images take advantage of the natural light. They appear as solarized images with very little tonal range which gives the city quite a melancholic feel similar to the view that the other two photographers have on the way we treat our city space. 

The locations photographed are highly populated however due to the long exposures the people are not visible and therefore creates a post-apocalyptic scene of emptiness; all three photographers photograph urban space as a vacant location which is completely opposite to reality.

She looks at constant movement of our society through a photograph of an aeroplane however due to the long exposure part way through the plane has lifted off leaving the space vacant; I really like this ghostly effect which creates a double exposure feel to the single image.

The camera obscura is usually set looking down over a large expanse to expose the scape in cities as well as possibly commenting on pollution. This is because Lutter has chosen to leave her image in negative form therefore the building windows shine brightly against the dark buildings giving a sense of wasted energy much like a heat sensor image would appear.

All photographers look at our ignorant view on the world; they are all, even though totally differently composed trying to make us look at the little things in the frame, the sign reflected in the puddle, the note wedged in a parking meter, the tiny windows lining the skyscrapers; again highlighting our throwaway society whether its rubbish or energy. It is interesting how they all focus on scenes where no human presence occurs despite their work commenting on humans’ actions, showing how we have come and changed the world and could possibly leave it.

Light is an important element most definitely in Luxemburg and Lutter’s work both only being able to produce images by exposing their photographic material to light sources for long periods of time; whereas Wentworth’s lighting is very different however it reflects his message of melancholy over the situation much like the other two photographer’s work.

By being given this task of exploring different photographers work it has helped me to open my eyes up more and further my own unit of work on the city, thinking even more about lighting and how composition changes the atmosphere of the image. I have been particularly attracted to Rut Blees Luxemburg’s compositions of images set in car parks as I am already exploring this vacant urban space so I hope to explore her work a little more.