PEPSI DEGENERATION.(The Talk of the Town)("The Deconstruction of Pepsi-Cola" a series of photographs by Vera Lutter)

When Pepsi-Cola erected its big red neon sign in Long Island City, along the Queens side of the East River, in 1936, ships would steam up to the plant below it and unload sacks of sugar from Havana. Soda hasn't been bottled there for five years now, and the plant is being torn down this month to make way for a high-rise apartment complex, so the sign--unofficial landmark and longtime beacon to local residents, film location scouts, and drunken taxicab passengers on the F.D.R. Drive--has to move. Over the past few weeks, it has migrated, letter by letter, from the plant's roof to a site on the ground, three hundred feet to the south.

Each morning, as a group of riggers dismantled the logo, Vera Lutter was watching. Lutter is a forty-four-year-old artist who moved to the city from Munich eleven years ago. "They work very, very fast, much faster than I thought," she said the other day. "Since Monday, they took the bottle, the P, E, P, S, the I--and the hyphen. And today they set their hands on the C in 'cola.' "

Lutter was observing the proceedings from inside a twenty-foot-long wood-frame shack that she built on the factory's roof. She calls it a camera obscura, and it's modelled on the optical devices used by Renaissance artists as a drawing tool; it's basically a giant pinhole camera. Sunlight streams through a two-millimetre opening on one side and projects an upside-down, reversed image of the Pepsi sign onto the opposite wall, where each morning Lutter drapes three big sheets of photosensitive paper. The light burns the image into the paper, which Lutter then takes down and develops and assembles into a single fifteen-by-eight-foot photographic print at her studio, in Manhattan. The prints make up a series that she calls "The Deconstruction of Pepsi-Cola."

She takes only one picture a day, because each print needs up to three hours' exposure. The workmen don't stand still long enough to register as fixed images, but the camera ...