Rut Blees Luxemburg, Richard Wentworth and Vera Lutter

Rut Blees Luxemburg 

A Modern Project

Black Sunrise

In her work Luxemburg uses a large format Camera to capture cityscapes. She photographs at night because she is interested how the city at night reveals itself and detaches the human presence and use. She also uses long exposures to create these images because the lack of direct light unlike if she was photographing in the daytime . What I most admire about her work is her choice of lighting because it gives a tonal range in her work of Yellows, Oranges and Greens which gives an ambient urban glow. The Camera height she uses can vary from the top image taken from high up to the bottom image taken from a low angle

Richard Wentworth 

Wentworth is traditionally a Sculptor who is focused on the idea of the alteration and transformation of everyday objects and  made a series called "Making Do and Getting By" where he photographed everyday objects that were left in the street often abandoned like rubbish. I think the use of soft cloudy/ overcast lighting further stimulates the feeling of isolation of the objects. The objects also act as an impracticable and odd replacements for the standard practical objects that would be used. In terms of camera height most is looking down at the objects.

Vera Lutter

Lutter creates this series by turning a room in her apartment into a life size pinhole camera and directly exposing the outside world onto wall sized sheets of photographic paper. She is interested in architecture in New York City where she was living at the time and by light and the city's presence. By photographing like this she maintains the purity of the photograph in it's simplest form without alteration or reproducing the images. I think her work is complete contradiction of the process of photography by not altering what the camera actually see before we turn a negative into a positive image.

When comparing the photographers in terms of aesthetics I find that Luxemburg's work is intimidating due to the choice of working with ambient/street lighting where with Wentworth's work I find to be intimate and inviting due to the use of soft lighting and with Lutter's work I find to be unsettling and scary due to the choice of keeping the photograph unchanged. What I find similar between Luxemburg and Lutter's work is that you get a lot of detail in the photographs and the shapes and lines are very similar. Comparing Wentworth to Luxemburg and Lutter, Wentworth focuses on the intimate details by only looking at objects within the space of an urban environment while the other two don't really focus on that much singular detail.