In “Hesitating Beauty,” Lutz breaks down the structure of the photograph as truth and challenges the traditional function of the medium in building narrative. The project is an intimate portrait of the artist’s mother unlike any other photographic model.
Blending family archives, interviews, and letters with his own photographic images, Lutz spins a seamless and strangely factual (yet unflinchingly fabricated) experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Rather than showing us what it looks like, “Hesitating Beauty” plays with our conceptions of reality to show us what it feels like to grapple with a family member’s retreat from lucidity.