In addition to her use of room-size cameras, Lutter also makes photographs using portable “trunk” cameras—luggage-type trunks adapted into pinhole cameras and set on tripods. During her residency, she would regularly set up these cameras in the galleries on Wednesdays (the one day of the week the museum is closed to the public). Several of the images in this group are photographs taken during the exhibition The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts, which was on view at LACMA in 2017.

The painting photographed here, Ludovico Mazzanti’s Death of Lucretia, draws on an episode from ancient Roman history in which Lucretia, wife of the consul to the Roman Republic, was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the tyrannical king of Rome. To redeem her honor, Lucretia killed herself with a dagger, but not before appealing to her husband and father to avenge her death. In Mazzanti’s painting, we see Lucretia at the very moment she plunges a knife into her chest.

MARIA NORDMAN YANG NA 2011–PRESENT
Inter-generational inter-performative-sculpture—
With & for the maker or receiver of the image
Sunlight & contextual illumination
With black anodized movable aluminum frame.
A 24-hour work on loan to LACMA
Height of screen 279 cm.
Horizon of the two screens 741.7 cm.
Depth of the separating wall 208.3 cm.
 

The conceptual starting point for Lutter’s residency at LACMA was her ambition to record, with a camera obscura, a photograph similar to the painted scenes of picture gallery interiors popularized during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Hubert Robert’s famous paintings of the Grande Galerie of the Musée du Louvre.

To make this photograph, Lutter positioned objects and artifacts from the Pacific Islands in a gallery arrangement she curated specifically for her camera, configuring the artworks based on the compositional needs of her photograph, rather than regional or chronological relationships among the objects. Reflecting on the making of this image, Lutter noted: “I was allowed to pick all my favorite pieces….

Lutter, who is best known for her photographs of cityscapes, transportation hubs, and industrial sites, had never attempted to make studio photographs of two-dimensional subjects prior to her residency at LACMA. In collaboration with the museum, Lutter had two room-size cameras and two custom easels constructed specifically to photograph paintings from LACMA’s permanent collection.

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