years, the artist visited and re-visited the town, setting up a portrait studio
where she created images of the local children, and collaborating with them on
a film where they are portrayed in the pristine surrounding landscape.
The large format images in the portrait series, entitledPine Flat Portrait Studio,
are hardly outmoded in terms of their literal form or medium. Instead, it is the
photographs’conventions–and perhaps their subject, rural youth, as well–that
bespeak the past, as Lockhart engages the history and address of a specific kind
of vanished, non-art photographic portraiture, produced in rural locales in the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by commercial photographers
from August Sander in Germany to Mike Disfarmer in the United States. While
Sander photographed his subjects in the context of their environment (some-
thing Lockhart engages more in her film than in her photographs), Disfarmer
isolated his in an extremely Spartan studio setting, with all his subjects posed
on a bare concrete floor against the same dark, blank backdrop. It was as if Dis-
farmer’s subjects existed in a mournful void, the industrial setting and tech-
nique of the photograph emerging as the most extreme opposition to the rural
Arkansas population.Lockhart replicates this scenario exactly, and follows
Disfarmer’s reliance only on natural light and thus longer exposure times, al-
lowing the subjects perhaps to“grow”into their image, almost to“bloom”. Pro-
voking an observing attentiveness with an extreme focus on detail, we would
seem to be in the presence of an embrace of that leave-taking before the world–
a kind of involuntary documentary impulse–that theorist Kaja Silverman has
characterized as the“author-as-receiver”. And yet the images present problems
for us, in ways beyond the fact that their conventions are“appropriated”.
In each photograph, the children adopt a pose; they do not present them-
selves“objectively”or analytically, all in the same position. Hands are placed
on hips, or stuffed into pockets; arms are crossed defensively, or hold an attri-
bute, like a drawing pad or a hunter’s rifle or a lollipop. While the criticism of
Pine Flathas emphasized that Lockhart entered into a form of collaboration
with her subjects that is characteristic of all her projects–which, for the most
part, revise problematic conventions of human portraiture–we cannot be sure
of the origins of the pose, whether it comes from the artist or subject; the attri-
butes may also have been the children’s idea or were potentially provided for
them by the author. We face a similar quandary with regard to costume, which
ranges here from everyday jeans and T-shirts to elaborate biker outfits and com-
binations even more outlandish than the general tendency of children to mix-
and-match clashing pieces (witness a young girl seemingly buried beneath her
accoutrements, which include a catcher’s mask, cowboy boots, fringed tur-
quoise riding chaps, a hunter’s vest and an out-sized plaid flannel shirt marked
with the word“Wrangler”, a cowboy nostalgia brand popular with American
children in thes). It is entirely unclear, in other words, whether the photo-
124 George Baker