Music was included inPine Flatas well, where an intermission linking the
two halves of the film was filled with the sound of a young boy playing guitar
and singing along to a prior“model”, creating his own, tentative version of the
angst-ridden pop-punk anthem“Stay Together for the Kids”by the California
band Blink-. We listen to the boy as he diverges from the original song, and
even changes key from time to time. With this, Lockhart signals the processes of
attunement that in fact run throughout the whole of thePine Flatproject. For
here, it is the staged,“manipulated”image that registers the model of the
author-as-receiver, producing an uncanny rhyming of past and present, a mel-
ancholic looking back (to a time of origins, or of the lost object) that paradoxi-
cally locates or models a new beauty in the world today, a new value in the
present time.
Indeed, aside from considerations of artificial costume and pose, or potential
models in image banks from other places, people, and times, the photographs in
the seriesPine Flat Portrait Studiomanifest one manipulation more directly than
any other: each of the images are“attuned”to all the rest. By precisely altering
the distance of her camera to the children based on their relative sizes, Lockhart
was able to photograph each child at the very same scale within the frame; the
oldest and tallest of the children occupy the same space within the image as the
youngest and smallest. The children thus all seem to literally“rhyme”as they
are brought into physical correspondence with each other. The tactic seems ega-
litarian, but it is also deeply de-individuating, confusing the series’reliance on
photographic objectivity and the portrait genre’s role in the construction of
identity. Arranged in a set diegetic horizontal line and mostly organized from
younger to older children, the portrait series’attunement of all its images works
against this ordering device as well. For we seem to perceive the slowing of the
linear march of time, or witness it halted in its tracks altogether. Photographs of
sisters perhaps taken at the same time seem like potential images of the same
person taken at two different ages; photographs of the same child taken at two
different moments during the project’s life become impossible to reconcile, as if
aging bifurcated the child into two different subjects, or conversely, was held in
abeyance, its physical signs such as growth all but cancelled out. In this, the
portrait series finds itself beset by wayward analogies, unruly photographic cor-
respondences and affinities, and begins to produce forms of what we might
imagine as the kind of“falsifying movements”within time more characteristic
of the medium of avant-garde cinema. The photographs thus attune themselves
to film.
Conversely, thePine Flatfilm attunes itself to photography. Each image
within it remains largely static; cinematic movement lies suspended; the film
seems to slow, to become, like a photograph, almost“still”. In this, the photo-
graphic attunement of film appears like a turning back of Lockhart’s medium
130 George Baker