was playing or practicing. However, Lockhart’s images were arrived at only
after the girls chose favorite sports photographs of (mostly American) basket-
ball stars upon which to model their actions and their poses.
Lockhart’s photographs thus dismantle many of the assumptions both of art
portraiture and ethnographic documentation, the two discursive formations to
which her work seemed oriented. Modeling pose and costume upon prior
images was not her only strategy. As inPine Flat, the settings in which the act
of portraiture occurs became an over-riding concern–the photograph’s“world”
in other words. This was enacted most poignantly in her Brazil projects that led
up to the filmTeatro Amazonas(). Following anthropologists on research
trips in the Amazon basin, Lockhart produced a series of images that moved
laterally away from direct portraits of the ethnographic“subjects”of the field
research. In her seriesInterview Locations, she photographed the homes in which
the subjects had been interviewed, but absent of their inhabitants. Simulta-
neously, she requested treasured snapshots from the same families, which she
then re-photographed for a series entitledFamily Photographs. The result was a
first series that gathered to itself so many images of seemingly abandoned
homes, emptied-out domestic spaces, and another that spoke of time past in an
anonymous voice, like rootless or discarded memories bereft of their individual
owners.
Nostalgia whispered through both of these two projects inasmuch as the
abandoned domestic interiors appeared like old black-and-white photographs
of the kind Walker Evans had once made for his projectLet Us Now Praise Fa-
mous Men; the re-photographed family snapshots also attached themselves to
older imaging technologies and bygone times. But nostalgia attached itself even
more deeply to those early works by Lockhart where her focus on youth por-
traits and on domestic interiors came together. All without titles, these now sin-
gle images were filled with a general sense of languor and of suspension: a
photograph of a young girl napping on or near a glass table, enveloped by its
mirror embrace; a young woman in an old, fading home turned away from the
camera. Rather than snapshots or documents, whose content they imitated,
these images were elaborately staged, with locations scouted, costumes chosen,
and lighting arranged again along the cinematic model. Similar images of chil-
dren were made simultaneously in natural settings, looking forward in this way
toPine Flat. But the peculiarity of almost all of these latter photographs, like
the diptychJulia, Thomas() or otherUntitledimages from–and per-
haps attributing to their enigma and suspended sense of time–was how in each
image the subject did not look forward but turned away, or turned back, to look
along with the viewer into the black or fog-enshrouded distance of the photo-
graph.
126 George Baker