Stand-in for Ben Gazzara, Los Angeles, California, March,. The result is im-
mensely confusing, and yet intensely auratic: it is as if this commonplace cin-
ematic practice during filming has produced a document of two individuals
now deeply aligned, exchanging places with each other,“attuned”from one to
the other. Possible scenarios proceed from this uncanny attunement, narratives
having nothing to do with the story that we assume was being filmed: perhaps
we face an amorous situation, a document of a couple in the intimate space of
their bed. Or perhaps we face a memory, like those where we recognize an in-
tensely personal attachment to a parent, but can’t remember if we are thinking
of an image of our“father”or our“mother”, interchanging them within our
minds. Or it is as if we see a scene of deep but loving identification, where a
“daughter”takes the place and position of her“father”. All of these scenarios
seem legitimated by the images; none of them are definitive. And we hardly
need to stop here. For the situation only becomes more expansive when we
realize that these two photographs are themselves attuned to earlier images
within Lockhart’s oeuvre, by pose with theUntitledportrait of the sleeping
girl near the glass table, for example, or by gaze with Lockhart’s diptych of two
teenagers standing before the sea, staring into the camera as if they were reach-
ing toward each other as much as toward the viewer, across the gap of both
space and time–Lily (approximatelyam, Pacific Ocean), andJochen (approximately
pm, North Sea)(). And since all of these images may (or may not) be photo-
graphs aligned with Lockhart’s own memory images, the attunement becomes
more disorienting still.
In addition to alienating ready-made conventions, attunement can also
emerge from dissonance itself; Lockhart’s tactics seem dependent on such oppo-
sitions, and on the redemption implicit in overcoming them. Such was the task
of Lockhart’s filmTeatro Amazonas, where she filmed from the point of view
of the stage an audience in Brazil gathered to listen to an“atonal”composition
by Lockhart’s frequent collaborator Becky Allen.First, the project aligned the
atonal composition with the community portrayed before us; a choral work for
many voices attuned to a group of many faces gathered by Lockhart according
to similarly“atonal”–or rather alienating and inorganic–procedures derived
from sociology and statistics (a“scientific”sampling of the full range of the
population in the Brazilian city of Manaus). As the burst of vocal music began
to diminish over the course of the film–voice after voice eventually dropping
out–the music’s fading allowed the ambient“sound”of the community to
emerge, to be“born”. And so multiple dissonances came into alignment here,
climaxing in what we might consider a foundational series for the artist: the
attunement of the viewer and the viewed, of self and other, and of history and
the present, as an audience in the past faces and models an audience gazing at
the film at each moment of its present or future screening.
After“Photography’s Expanded Field” 129