haps also with our own. The project embodies a literal nostalgia, a seeming
resurrection or retrieval of youth, of childhood, of a time long past. It seems to
fixate there, and the static camera that Lockhart utilizes amounts to just one sign
of this. But we face a strange form of nostalgic pining. Pining denotes a melan-
cholic wasting away from longing–for home and for the past. InPine Flat,
however, this pining becomes a way to turn the wasting away into a gesture of
generosity. Now it is the pining for the past inPine Flatthat displaces the
hegemony of the author; it is a“wasting away”that makes space for the other.
A giving up and giving over, such longing also hollows out the image of the
past, exteriorizing it and depersonalizing it. We hardly know to whom these
memories belong (it is why we hardly recognize themasmemories). Thus exter-
iorized, they can be claimed by others in the present. Simultaneously, this pin-
ing interiorizes; the wasting away from longing opens up a hole within the self,
the emptiness and loss of melancholia, into which the other–the past of the
other, the memories of another–can be inserted, and where they can also be
preserved. And so here, to pine away for the past becomes an opening up to
the world. It follows the ramifications of attunement, the impossible correspon-
dence, the distanced rhyming (the rhyming of distance)–where now the other
can be installed within the self, and the self shared vertiginously with the other.
Pine Flatamounts to a displaced self-portrait. But it is also an“other-por-
trait”, an imaging of the shared space between the self and the other. Thus, in
our attunement to the children ofPine Flat, we do not“identify”with them,
but we perhaps recognize ourselves in them. We are called upon to desire this
self-exile. Following the work’s disorienting logic, we almost see them as our-
selves, but in the irretrievable past, and this becomes a motor for attachment in
the present: we see and experience ourselves as them, now. These two vertigi-
nously similar experiences may appear equivalent; they are instead attune-
ments, attempts to bring close two things that will never be the same. The epi-
sodes ofPine Flatemerge as what we might call documents of memory, and
also fictions of reality. At the same time they also rhyme with the opposite of
such experience (as, in Lockhart’s work, oppositions always come undone). For
Pine Flatalso embodies a collection of fictional memories and“realized”or
performed, documents. It testifies to an attempt literally to give shape to the
past–to reshape the past–as well as to allow its now-redeemed light to shine
quietly upon the present. It is an attunement of the one to the other. This attune-
ment of past and present joins all the other oppositions that structure Lockhart’s
work, the collaboration within her oeuvre of photography and film, document
and fiction, memory and imagination, artist and subject, self and other, viewer
and viewed. These oppositions are pairs, Lockhart shows us; and rather than
hold themselves apart, they call out to each other. Attunement becomes here
After“Photography’s Expanded Field” 133