* omslag Between Stillness PB:DEF

It has gradually become apparent that these early portraits take an opposite,
but linked, approach to that evidenced in a series likeAudition. For if the latter
photographs approximated snapshots but had been modeled upon a cinematic
“source”, here Lockhart’s cinematic portraits held a kind of mysterious dialog
with prior documents, in this case family snapshots. Beginning in, Lock-
hart had already adopted the strategy enacted later in Brazil for theFamily
Photographsseries, engaging in a kind of“self-ethnography”as she began to re-
photograph her own personal archive of her family’s photo-albums. The series
continues to the present day; Lockhart calls each of these images anUntitled
Study (re-photographed snapshot). In many of these“studies”we see Lockhart as
a child in the arms of her father, or holding hands with her mother or sister,
almost always turned away from the camera. Hardly any critical accounts have
noticed or remarked upon these images. One exception is the early essay on
Lockhart by Timothy Martin, who comments on their relation to theUntitled
photographs of-:

Lockhart’s pictorial language was now beginning to take the role of characterization

upon itself, employing a cinematic sense of mise-en-scène as its chief device–though

making no further overt reference to specific films. Nearly all of the untitled large-

scale color photographs of-pursue this pictorial language to greater and

greater degrees of scenic involution and mystery. And in nearly all of them the human

subject is obliquely posed, many with back to camera: a figure of vacancy, stillness,

and deferral within a picture of tense visual expectation. Curiously, a few of these

poses echo those seen in the artist’s rephotographed family snapshots, which she has

produced from[sic] to the present day. In these nostalgic images, she, her sister,

mother, and father appear as solitary or paired figures, typically with backs to cam-

era, before natural vistas or more domestic placid scenery. The sense of longing and

deferral in these images offers a powerful, though muted, personal counterpoint to

the cinematic grandness of the large-scale photographs, which appear to derive from

them in ways that remain essentially indeterminate and private.

The Untitled Studyseries thus does not exactly amount to a set of image
“sources”. Instead, they are held in lesser-or-greater dialog with Lockhart’s cin-
ematic portraits–a strangely distanced relation to images of one’s personal his-
tory coming into contact with a distanced, staged image of intimacy in the pre-
sent. And this“dialog”, I would say, continues into the present, as the natural
scenery and the poses of the re-photographed family snapshots find a startling
series of echoes in the current images fromPine Flat. Indeed, now Lockhart
has re-photographed a series of commercial portraits of herself and her sister
produced in thes andsasUntitled Studyimages, documenting some
kind of historical survival of the portrait practice engaged in by Disfarmer into
her own personal history, which she then extends to the children inPine Flat.

After“Photography’s Expanded Field” 127