Battersea Power Station XVIII

LondonÂ’s Battersea Power Station is a familiar image in works of art and photographs, but few pictures of it have been as striking as this one. To make her large-format photographs Vera Lutter first builds a room-sized camera obscura on site. She then allows light to pass through a tiny aperture and cast an image of the outside view on to light-sensitised paper on the back wall. A long exposure of days or weeks records not only static objects but ghostly imprints of people, machines and birds in movement. Lutter, a New York-based German artist, shows the roofless interior and skeletal structure of the power station in the process of being transformed into a development of apartments, offices and shops. What she has captured in this romantic image is the passing of the landmark buildingÂ’s old life, and the beginning of its new one.