Colby College Museum of Art
5600 Mayflower Hill
Waterville, Maine
Through October 17
Questioning the conventions
of documentary filmmaking
and photography, Sharon
Lockhart creates a multilayered
representation of
industrial workers at Maine’s
largest shipyard at mid-day
rest.
For about a year, from 2007 to 2008,
Sharon Lockhart photographed and
filmed workers during their lunch breaks
at Bath Iron Works (BIW). The resulting
exhibition, “Sharon Lockhart: Lunch
Break,” is composed of two films and
photographs of three distinct subjects:
group portraits of workers during their
breaks that hark back to historical group
portraiture, tableaux of independent
lunch businesses in the yard, and
workers’ lunchboxes shot in a quasianthropological
manner against neutral
backdrops. All of Lockhart’s work blurs
conventions associated with film and
photography, but here she does it with
a more dramatic twist.
The film “Lunch Break” (Assembly Hall,
Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007,
Bath, Maine) was shot in 10 minutes
but has been digitally extended to 80
minutes. The camera incrementally
moves through a corridor along which
workers eat their meals, talk, drink or
otherwise pass the time, acting like
small pockets of life and movement in
the wings of a stage set. The extreme
slowness of the film frees our eyes
to roam and allows us to get totally
immersed in the space-time continuum
of the camera’s forward movement,
especially since the projection screen is installed in a black, tunnel-like
space mirroring the hallway. Something
though seems to be askew here. The
subjects in the film seem to purposely
ignore the camera and its operator as
if planned. Indeed, artist and workers
collaborated on the specifics of this
shot.
Likewise, the four richly detailed group
portraits appear staged and remind one
of operatic scenes in which the actors
have assumed expressive and declarative
stances. The lunchbox photographs are
portraits of another sort; these images
monumentalize their subjects and do
not include any context. The exhibition
catalogue explains that the artist traded
the workers their boxes for new ones
and shot these images in her studio
back in Los Angeles. In some cases she
even asked them to FedEx their lunches
to complete the set.
The five large photographs of
independent lunch businesses and
Lockhart’s second film, “Exit,” do not
display the same complexity. Like
carved-out niches of comfort, the
tables and makeshift booths populated
by BIW workers seem like paeans to
stereotypical concepts of masculinity
(with their no-nonsense set-ups,
demonstration of good-natured humor,
payment code of honor and images of
motorcycles, baseball heroes and fast
cars — but, as we are in a workplace
here, no alcohol or sex).
Indeed, there are few women at BIW,
a fact quite obvious in “Exit,” which
concludes the exhibition. A static
camera positioned at the gate of BIW
recorded workers leaving the yard
(inviting comparisons to the Lumière
.jpg)
