graphs are to be understood as fictions or as documents, whether they engage
in performative acting or testify to an unselfconscious“being”, whether they
approximate Disfarmer’s models from the past or locate an untouched pocket
of rural existence in the present.
And Lockhart’s film presents us with a similar set of problems. Working in
mm, Lockhart’s medium in this instanceisdeeply obsolescent; however, here
too there is a paradox.Pine Flatconnects its outmoded analog form to the
pristine subject of youth and nature–however potentially threatened in our
postindustrial present. The form is almost classical: Lockhart films episodes
that are all ten minutes in length, with six of individual children and then six
more of the children gathered into groups. The ten-minute expanse corresponds
to the full length of a single reel ofmm film. During the time in which the film
is allowed to roll to its depletion without interruption or cuts, Lockhart’s camera
remains absolutely still. It is also insistently frontal or“objective”. In this, the
camera’s fixed and passive gaze registers the non-heroic, non-narrative activ-
ities of the children, as they perform simple tasks–like reading a book in a field,
sleeping near some mountain rocks, listening to the forest sounds while hunt-
ing, or waiting before a verdant valley for a slowly approaching school bus–
throughout the full duration of the scene. All of the“open”passive attributes of
the author-as-receiver seem in effect. And yet, while Lockhart supposedly
“scouted”her pristine locations with the children, and perhaps discussed with
them what activities they might enjoy based on their own proclivities, we again
are not faced with a film of“found”documentary footage, even though this is
its address. All of the episodes were staged for the camera. It is as if Lockhart
does not recognize the opposition between fiction and documentary at all.
Such has been the ambivalence of Lockhart’s images from the very beginnings
of her career. The vast majority of her earlier portrait projects were focused on
children or young adults. In herAuditionseries from, Lockhart photo-
graphed children locked in an awkward but deeply touching embrace, as if she
were trying to capture the non-replicable moment of one’s“first kiss”. However,
Lockhart produced five of these images, each with different children but in the
same locale. Impossible then to read as documentary or photojournalism–
hardly examples of the“decisive moment”–Lockhart’s images instead de-
ployed the Hollywood or theatrical conventions of the audition, and each image
was the result of the children’s attempt to replicate a prior image, in this case the
climactic“first kiss”scene from one of François Truffaut’s films about children,
L’argent de poche(). They thus presented a series of“memories”we
might characterize as“falsifying”–we might even say“exteriorizing”. Lock-
hart’s photographs for the later projectGoshogaoka() followed a similar lo-
gic. We see a series of individual or group portraits of Japanese girls, members
of the same high school basketball team, seemingly captured while the team
After“Photography’s Expanded Field” 125