Sharon Lockhart

Photography and Film in the 1990s—A Period That Questioned the Observer’s Authority

Short-term documentary has often explained an entire community through limited encounters, while ethnography has circulated an outsider’s classification as objective knowledge. In the 1990s, artists and critics increasingly asked who could represent others and which institutions received those images. MCA Chicago’s 2001 exhibition introduced Lockhart as an artist who uses both film and photography to turn everyday actions into rigorously composed images.^*2Structural film had foregrounded the apparatus through fixed cameras and long takes, though formal purity could outweigh social relations. Lockhart combined extended residence, reenactment by participants, and the fixed frame into a single process, addressing questions left by both outsider observation and formalism. ArtCenter’s alumni materials record her 1993 MFA and her continued work across photography and film.^*16MoMA describes Goshogaoka as an examination of the boundary between documentary and performance through time, movement, ritual, and chance.^*4

Why Use Still Images and Film?—Experiencing the Same Place Through Different Durations

A photograph allows viewers to compare the arrangement, gaze, and clothing of bodies, but it suspends the time through which an action unfolds. Film records duration, yet editing can easily organize an event into a single narrative. Lockhart produced photographs and films in parallel from the same communities, allowing the limitations of each medium to offset the other. In the photographs, viewers can read the positions of individuals, pairs, and groups; in the films, they experience repetition, pause, and fluctuations of attention within shared time. Harvard Art Museums emphasizes the way her film and photography move across the forms of the album, portrait, and regional study.^*3The two media were necessary to see the same place at different temporal scales without compressing the subject into one representative image or a single narrative.

Goshogaoka—Turning the Discipline of School Athletics into Choreography for the Camera

Goshogaoka, made in 1997, followed several months spent with a girls’ basketball team at a junior high school in Ibaraki Prefecture. Lockhart composed their everyday drills into six takes of approximately ten minutes each.^*4The camera is fixed low on the court. Games and the coach’s instructions remain outside the frame, allowing calls and bodily rhythms to appear as distinct studies.^*12Because the players reenact their usual drills, the existing discipline of the school team overlaps with choreography arranged for the camera. In The Broad’s related photographs, the players appear individually, in pairs, and as a group within highly frontal frames, making both the institution of the team and each body visible.^*6

Fixed Camera and Long Take—Making Artistic Control and Unplanned Variation Visible Together

Handheld filming and rapid editing let the camera operator move the gaze and continuously select important moments. Lockhart determines the framing first and holds it for an extended period. The artist’s authority remains: the chosen composition persists visibly. Within it, however, changes in concentration, boredom, breathing, and ambient sound gradually emerge. Harvard Art Museums notes that the parallel development of film and photography allows portraiture and regional study to be compared.^*3The long take makes slowness both an aesthetic effect and a demand on viewers, who must attend to the artist’s frame and the subject’s time at once.

Pine Flat—Sustaining Children’s Time Without Explaining It

Pine Flat was made over nearly four years in a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills and consists of a film with twelve fixed shots and nineteen photographic portraits.^*8The Hammer Museum notes that Lockhart formed relationships with local children while photographing them in a studio set up in a barn.^*1In the film, children remain alone or in small groups within the landscape, without adult narratives of development or explanations of social problems. Duration itself gives time to their present perceptions and actions and does not reduce them to incomplete adults.

Lunch Break—Extending an Eleven-minute Break to Eighty-three Minutes

For Lunch Break, Lockhart spent a year visiting Bath Iron Works in Maine and observing workers’ routines and breaks.^*5A roughly eleven-minute tracking shot down a shipyard corridor was stretched to approximately eighty-three minutes. The reworked voices, machinery, and footsteps turn a brief pause from production into an immense duration. SFMOMA discusses the work in relation to the economic decline of the American industrial working class and the overlooked activities that take place during breaks.^*5Official project materials show that the same research also produced photographs and publications on small shops, lunch boxes, lockers, and break rooms.^*11The long take turns the factory into a vast temporal structure, whilethe still photographs record the objects and small-scale commerce that support breaks as a concrete social history.

Photographs and Newspapers That Do Not Reduce Workers to “Working Bodies”

Alongside the film, Lockhart exhibited photographs of snack stands run like small businesses, lockers, lunch boxes, and break rooms.^*18Instead of defining workers through heroic poses of labor, the project attends to the small economies and relationships made between tasks.The accompanying newspaper, The Lunch Break Times, circulated writing on labor history and the break, making the site’s social history available to read inside the museum.^*18Photography, film, and print open the same place through different speeds and modes of reading.

Noa Eshkol—Reenacting an Archive Without Isolating a Single Author

In a project on the Israeli choreographer, movement notation researcher, and textile artist Noa Eshkol, Lockhart organized the surviving carpets, notation systems, and dancers’ bodies through photographs and films. LACMA presented the project as a multimedia study of Eshkol’s varied achievements.^*15The Jewish Museum exhibition placed Eshkol’s works and movement notation alongside Lockhart’s films and photographs.^*9Beyond displaying archival materials, the project restaged works through the bodies of surviving dancers, complicating the relations among the historical author, collaborators, and the contemporary photographer.The Noa Eshkol Foundation records that the exhibition brought movement notation, dancers, wall carpets, and Lockhart’s photographs and films together.^*10The form depended on selecting works with living dancers and reenacting them through the body.

Keeping Formalism and Social Engagement Together

Lockhart’s strict compositions, frontal views, and long takes connect her work to structural film and conceptual photography. MoMA cites Michael Snow, James Benning, and Jean Rouch among her historical reference points.^*4The Liverpool Biennial, meanwhile, centers the years of research and collaboration with communities that culminate in her photographs and films.^*19Her place in photographic history comes from treating formal structure as a way of allocating time to others.

The Ethics of Collaboration—Not Mistaking Intimacy for Transparency

Differences of power between photographer and subject remain after long residence. Lockhart determines the fixed frame, staging, and scale of exhibition, while changing the participants’ role from project to project. The Broad discusses a work showing installers placing a Duane Hanson sculpture from four directions, noting how artifice reveals a concealed layer of truth.^*7Goshogaoka reenacts the movements of school athletics; Pine Flat created a portrait studio children could enter and leave; Lunch Break built a film from research into the work environment.Rudzienko developed conversations and movement through workshops with young women at a social therapy center over more than two years.^*13The Mike Kelley Foundation records that activities involving reading and speech grew through collaboration with the participants.^*17The meaning of “collaboration” therefore differs from project to project and must be assessed through who determines the movement, who speaks, and who edits the final image.

Where Structural Film, Conceptual Photography, and Collaborative Documentary Meet

The fixed camera and long take draw from structural film; frontality and repetition from conceptual photography; extended residence from documentary and socially engaged art. Lockhart integrated them into a single project structure, making the time spent before filming and the time demanded of viewers as important as the image’s content. Museum collections including the Guggenheim indicate a reception that exceeds the categories of photographer and filmmaker.^*14The critical force of this method becomes clear when each project is examined for the extent of participants’ involvement and the sites where the images circulate.

Teatro Amazonas and the Ethnographic Gaze—Refusing to Turn a Group into a Single Cultural Image

In Teatro Amazonas, a fixed camera filmed an audience gathered in the Manaus opera house for an extended duration from the stage. The audience is both the viewing subject and a group viewed by the camera. Her early work in the Amazon and later projects in Japan, the United States, Israel, and Poland raise an ethnographic question about how a traveling artist observes across cultures. MoMA places Lockhart in dialogue with Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner while noting her attention to the roles class and race have played in the traditions of portraiture, landscape, and still life.^*4The fixed frame, actions developed with participants, and extended residence keep the terms of observation visible within the work. This approach slows the impulse to read subjects as typical representatives of a community and gives post-1990s documentary a way to make the circumstances of observation legible through duration. Moving between photography and film tests this approach through both static comparison and sustained experience. CalArts’ faculty materials show that her cross-media work continues in both artistic production and teaching.^*20