After“Photography’s Expanded Field”
George Baker
In what follows, I would like to do at least two things that my essay“Photogra-
phy’s Expanded Field”did not do. First, I would like to present an extremely
close reading of a specific artist’s practice as it is opened up and indeed was
formed by the precise interpenetration of photography and cinema that I ex-
plored in my earlier essay. In fact, I will treat in detail a project by the Los An-
geles-based artist Sharon Lockhart entitledPine Flatthat came to fruition in
, the year of my essay’s publication (and was thus not at all covered). Sec-
ond, and more importantly, I offer this close reading as an amplification of the
formal mapping of photography’s expansion that my earlier essay hoped to
broach. By amplification, I mean radicalization, in a way; what I hope to do
here is deal not just with the forms and possibilities opened up by the expansion
of the medium of photography, but with themeaning, and perhaps too the moti-
vations, for the insistence with which many artists today emplace their practice
betweenmediums, or engage in the cinematic opening of the still photograph
that has been my concern. Another way of stating this radicalization would be
to say that my concern today is less with the“objective”or structural mapping
performed in my earlier essay; the interpenetration of forms, the expansion of
mediums like the photograph has too a“subjective”logic, and it is to the desir-
ing politics of the expansion of photography that I hope to turn.
In the first“episode”of Sharon Lockhart’s recent filmPine Flat, we see a pine
forest blanketed by falling snow. We then hear–but do not see–a young girl,
whose plaintive cry echoes through the winter landscape:“Ethan...! Where are
you...?”And then:“Please Ethan! Come back...!”It seems like a game of hide-
and-seek that has perhaps gone awry. But this cry of loss strikes me as signifi-
cant, given the origin ofPine Flatin what we might call photographic strate-
gies of“objective chance”and the“found object”. Looking into get away
from her home and work in Los Angeles, Lockhart drove some four hours
north, into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There, she came across
a rural community by chance and decided to stay, because it struck her as deep-
ly“familiar”.While her previous work was known for an engagement with
ethnographic representation that led to far-flung projects in Japan, Mexico, and
Brazil, now Lockhart’s attention was held by a locale that reminded her of a
different sort of distance, a temporal one, as she claimed the community was
similar to sites where she had been raised. Over the course of the next four