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Sharon Lockhart's photographs emphasize vision, visuality, and the pleasure
of looking. Her large enigmatic color photographs are minutely descriptive-a
sweater's nubby yarn contrasts with skin which contrasts with a verdant
landscape. Lockhart renders all aspects of the physical image with a specific
clarity that while fully descriptive of skin, textiles, and atmosphere,
leaves the viewer adrift-unconnected from the images' metaphorical potential.
The figures are unknowable except for their physicality, because, ironically,
the dense descriptive nature of the image, while clarifying for us landscape
or detailing skin's surface, constructs a barrier to understanding the
landscapes or anything about the figures except that they are. Like the
tradition of densely descriptive 17th-century Dutch paintings, "instead
of interpretive depth we are offered a great and expansive attention to
specificity of representation." (1) Through the artificial mechanism
of the camera, Lockhart's saturated colors describe the world with that
same painterly clarity, suggesting how these two representational strategies
and practices intersect in her photographs.
Lockhart emphasizes the apparatus of the camera, demonstrating a moment
of descriptive filmic intervention rather than one of visual storytelling.
Because Lockhart makes the viewer aware of the camera's mechanism, she
undermines the traditional suspension of disbelief in the metaphoric possibilities
of a photographic image-think of movie still photographs and how we tend
to invent a story. Instead, we comprehend that her images are artificially
constructed moments in time that describe the physical world, and some
people in it, not the story of the physical world or the story of the
individuals pictured. Like 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer who
"presents the image as all we have," Lockhart reveals nothing
but the image-landscape, atmosphere, trees, people, sweater, and skin.
(2) These elements are neither emblematic nor symbolic; they do not stand
in for something else. Rather, Lockhart's figures and landscapes are objects
of her visual attention, myriad surfaces described to us in a visible
field.
In Portrait of a Boy, the boy appears sexually indeterminate,
so startlingly natural as to seem genderless. Lockhart presents his childishly
full face and creamy skin in a three-quarter view while the boy looks
directly into the camera. Lockhart positions the boy in the extreme foreground-he
seems so close to us-and while the background drops away from him it is
still in focus and we easily "read" its agrarian abundance.
The boy's vibrant red sweater contrasts sharply with the green fields
framing his shoulders. Because we are steeped in the language of visual
culture, especially photography-think of advertising-the boy's youthfulness
may suggest that he be understood beyond his physical body, that we intuit
something psychological about him. As art historian Griselda Pollock notes,
"Adolescence is the key condition; it is a moment of lack, waiting
to be filled with meaning ... Adolescence is posited as a period of transition
between the lack and the completion." (3) We may strain to add meaning
to what we understand to be a "moment waiting to be filled with meaning,"
but Lockhart leaves the viewer without any suggestion of what lies beyond
the beautifully specified surfaces of skin, clothing, or hair. According
to Robert Rosen in Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors,
Even in the face of totally nonrepresentational works, viewers have a
powerful urge to uncover or invent narrative-a basic need to normalize
the challenge of the unfamiliar by situating it in a comfortably recognizable
sequence of events. (4) Though Lockhart's images are representational,
they may strike us with the same impulse because we want to know what
the pictured scenes may mean. Yet the artifice of Lockhart's photographed
scenes are visual spaces from which we are cut off, even when, for instance,
the boy in Portrait of a Boy looks directly at the camera. Because
he seems to look at the camera rather than at anyone beyond his photographic
space, he does not connect with us, nor does he draw us into his world.
We are blocked from that world, captured by Lockhart's unnerving ability
to depict its naturalness. Conversely and perversely, that pictorial ease
creates a barrier for us to psychologically or emotionally access the
image in the way that we are used to, or feel we are entitled to, by the
supposed naturalness of the image and the fact that, as in a snapshot,
he is a real boy and his "familiarity" fuels our need to know
him. Lockhart's photograph constructs a specified image-a person in a
place-but does not invent grounds for comprehending the interior life
of her subject.
Because all of the works are untitled except Portrait of a Boy,
no text intersects with the image to produce a narrative. With titled
images, meaning can emerge from the intersection of the image and a title.
In Lockhart's untitled images, however, the image intersects with itself
and we further find that none of the figures in this exhibition engages
the viewer. In another untitled work, a girl drapes her head, shoulders,
and arms across a table, the skin on her arms amply described by the play
of light across the entire upper surface of that arm. The cool surface
of the glass table slickly contrasts with the flesh of the girl's arm,
and we are not invited into her silent world. In another photograph, figures
of man and child stand with their backs toward us, engaged by and connected
to the landscape before them. That foggy landscape, which drops precipitously
away from the figures, allowing us a misted view of treetops, is similarly
unknowable, but fully described with Lockhart's filmic mark. What can
we make, then, of what film theorist Laura Mulvey calls the "aesthetics
of curiosity" that these unknowable figures suggest?5 Lockhart wittingly
produces in us desire to know these figures because the private, secretive
nature of the figures in these photographs is a seductive invitation.
Perhaps hers is an invitation only to enjoy observing, rather than knowing.
If the aim of 17th-century Dutch painters was to capture, on a surface,
knowledge and information about the world, based on the material wealth
of Dutch society and new fascination with seeing the world and making
it visible through microscopes, mirrors, and the camera obscura, Lockhart's
photographs similarly seem aimed at the same goal-to make this world,
here and now, visible. Her landscape images function in the same inscrutable
visual field as do her figural images. The two landscapes in this exhibition-a
snowy, wintery scene and an enormous tree-specify a physical, atmospheric
moment in earthly time. In all of her images, Lockhart has made the
world visually, not psychologically accessible. Ultimately, whether
through the figure or the landscape or both, Lockhart's strategies for
organizing space, color, light, and objects within a photographic frame
coalesce not into a coherent narrative or even individual stories, but
rather into individually described visual moments dedicated to the pleasure
of looking.
Dana Self
Curator |
