Vera Lutter, an artist who was born in 1960 in Kaiserslautern and who lives in New York, presents in her first art-book a part of her long-term project Void Transfer about our idea of mobility today: a study of Frankfurt International Airport. This “hub for a myriad of movements,” a place of passage, characterized by constant coming and going, is, however, transformed under her treatment into something still, frozen in light, as the Swedish art critic Gertrud Sandqvist writes in her accompanying essay.

Lutter responds to the hectic activity by taking hold of the various containers and coverings, be they airplane fuselages for taking on passengers and freight or the giant hangers where the machines are serviced, with an artistic technique whose spatial contents consist of emptiness. The camera-obscura, that primal form of modern photography, captures all the movements which occur during the period of exposure and lie within its field of vision, and it brings them to a standstill. The shapes oscillate between light and dark, clear and obscure, in reflected rays of light which are concentrated in the focus of the camera with its hole and are directed onto the back inner wall, where they are fixed by the emulsion of the photographic paper in a reversal of both the horizontal and vertical axes—unique images rich in nuance, presented here in outstanding printing quality. For her provisional receptive devices Lutter selects receptacles which are themselves associated with travel: a suitcase such as a traveler carries and a container that is intended for the conveyance of huge cargoes.

The pictures fluctuate between wakefulness and dream and emanate a mysterious beauty that has something mystical about it. “And thus through her camer-obscura pictures Vera Lutter helps us to rediscover our capacity for attention, for contemplation. She does this in the literal sense, too, by giving us a negative of the world. Through that emblem of the pre-modern world, classicism’s camera-obscura image of the world, she takes us beyond the modern to the mystical, which retains its secret in the midst of life.”

Light in Transit displays together for the first time the airport pictures created in April and May 2001.