Joshua Lutz

Joshua Lutz is an artist and educator working primarily in photography and text. His monographs include Meadowlands (2008, Powerhouse) and Hesitating Beauty (2013, Schilt). Lutz’s books have been named Best Art Books by Time Magazine, Photo District News, PhotoEye among others. Awards and Fellowships include The Aaron Siskind Fellowship, American Photography, Hudson Year Fellowship, Tierney Fellowship, Communication Arts, PDN 30. Solo shows include Clamp Art (New York), Koch Gallery (San Francisco), Blue Sky Lutz (Portland) Robert Morat (Hamburg), Robert Morat (Berlin). He has served on the faculty for The MFA Program at Bard College, The International Center of Photography, Pratt Institute, and is currently a Professor of Photography at SUNY Purchase.

Mind The Gap

There are these two worlds vying for my attention at all times. In one of them this diagnosis has metastasized to the brain and I am no longer able to care for my children. The bank takes over the house and I become an albatross in hands not fully formed. In the other world, noise shuts down for a very split second and the smallest fragment of light becomes a pathway to immortality. Colour is no longer a placeholder and language is no longer a tool. You can read this as small moments of clarity or large chunks of confusion. Either way, they mix with the noise and become gaps I long to possess.
– Joshua Lutz

The images and text in Joshua Lutz’s third monograph Mind The Gap (Schilt Publishing, June 2018) unravel a story of attempting to find some assemblage of truth in the chaos of hierarchy, class, and privilege. It is a journey for clarity hijacked by sex, addiction, and mental illness. As we traveled from a black and white world of photographs into color the reader is confronted with a space of groundlessness. Protagonists in the story are found clinging and grasping to everything they believe to be true.

Mind the Gap points to the physical, mental, and psychological gap we are confronted with in our daily lives. It is a reference to the gap between thoughts as well as the gap between coherence and confusion. Caught between thinking something is one thing and the reality of what it is, Mind the Gap functions as a reminder of the effort needed to let go of the stories we tell ourselves and rest for a brief moment in the space between thoughts.

All photographs are © Joshua Lutz

To view more of Joshua Lutz’s work please visit his website.