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NYT Syndicate
On a 2009 visit to Lodz, Poland, to gather ideas for a film, Sharon Lockhart was drawn into a gritty urban courtyard by the sound of children playing. That was where she first saw a 9-year-old girl named Milena Slowinska.
"You should have seen her, up on the roof, ruling the court," said Lockhart, a Los Angeles filmmaker and photographer known for her intimate studies of overlooked communities, often centred on childhood."She's a very powerful girl."
Inspired by the inventiveness of the children's unsupervised play, in which buildings became jungle gyms, Lockhart spent three months shooting their street games for a short film called Podworka ("courtyard" in Polish) that looked spontaneous but was actually staged.
Since then, Lockhart has returned to Poland more than 15 times to see Milena, now 16, who has come to assume a prominent role in the artist's life and work. Lockhart's friendship with the teenager has extended to her peers at the Youth Center for Socio-Therapy in Rudzienko, a home for troubled girls where Milena lived for several years. In a new 40-minute film, Rudzienko, Lockhart explores the emotions and self-expression of girls labelled difficult or unmanageable.
"I pay attention to children," said Lockhart, who is 51, but whose open manner seems nearly as youthful as her subjects'. In interviews, the teenagers said they were shocked to learn that she was older than 30.
She has forged an ethnographic approach to photography and filmmaking that combines documentary and re-enactments. She spent months studying the drill practices of a Japanese middle school's girls' basketball team for Goshogaoka (1997), screened at film festivals and institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She visited a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills over four years, for the film Pine Flat (2005), shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and she integrated herself in the world of manual labourers in Bath, Maine, her own hometown, for Lunch Break (2008), a slow-motion meditation on the customs of industrial workers during their downtime.
"She is thinking about how everyday people can be both subjects and performers," said Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which acquired Goshogaoka this year. Her early commitment to the fixed-frame camera, in the first decade of the Internet, when the speed of images was changing so frantically, was a"radical move," Comer said, based on her dedication to"what happens if you really scrutinise an image in all of its detail over a long period of time."
Lockhart cites the work of the French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch, who pioneered the style of ethnofiction, as inspirational, as well as the durational films of Andy Warhol.
Lockhart described her background as working class and said she did not consider college until the age of 21, when a family friend mentioned the New England School of Photography in Boston. In Lockhart's second year there, a teacher opened her eyes to conceptual art through the work of Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and James Welling.
"I feel very fortunate to have found a passion," said Lockhart, who moved west to get her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. Intent on studying with artists Mike Kelley and Stephen Prina, she went on to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She credits her teachers for recognising something in her that she didn't know how to define herself and hopes to do the same thing for the girls of Rudzienko, with whom she identifies.
"Just listening to them and telling them that they're special goes a long way," said Lockhart, whose work often explores subtleties about class."I think it's something that they'll take with them and spread to others."
She and Milena discovered an easy rapport when Lockhart, without a translator, was scouting locations for Podworka. She used a digital camera and body language to act out what she wanted from the children, and Milena became her de facto assistant director. As Milena explained by phone from Poland:"We met when I was still a punk. I was a little kid that all the other children listened to, so I would shout instructions at them."
Lockhart showed glimpses of this little girl's transition into adolescence in her exhibition 'Milena, Milena' this winter at the Gladstone Gallery in New York City. It included a photographic triptych of her at 13, concealing and then bashfully revealing her face through her hands."She's like the Mona Lisa," Lockhart said. In a film installation, a dramatically older-looking Milena, then 15, performs the final scene of Fran?§ois Truffaut's 1959 film The 400 Blows, in which she portrays the misunderstood youth, Antoine, who escapes from reform school.
Milena stares down the camera with a blend of toughness and vulnerability."I feel like this is the first time you're really seeing Milena," Lockhart said."The idea of re-enacting Antoine allowed her to perform herself."
The new film, Rudzienko, was shot during rural retreats Lockhart organised the past two summers for Milena and her peers, who went to a farm each day from the youth centre. Inspired by the theories of Janusz Korczak, a Polish educator who understood children's need for freedom of expression, Lockhart brought in a movement therapist, a theatre director, a philosopher and a curator, among others, to hold creative workshops to help the girls develop their voices. Lockhart filmed them speaking intimately about topics she knew they valued.
The film opens on a frame of a country landscape, a tree animated only by sounds of nature and voices. Slowly, girls emerge from the camouflage of its branches, and the screen then cuts to a written conversation including this interchange:
"Sometimes I feel like God controls everything. ..."
"I just don't buy it. I think everyone controls their own life. ... You walk down your own path. Even if somebody stands in your way. ..."
"Except that sometimes along the way you can make lots of mistakes. ..."
"Mistakes reveal things."
Lockhart, who is married to Alex Slade, a photographer, also holds a dialogue with her own childhood in the Arts Club exhibition by including family snapshots originally taken by her mother outdoors in Maine. The artist began reshooting these pictures in 1994, appropriating them for a project she calls 'Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot)'.
She admires her mother's aesthetic instinct for photographing people from behind, which informs how Lockhart composes her own work. On a visit last year to Maine, she was surprised to unearth a photograph of her mother in the woods, dressed in costume for one of the plays that the artist, her sister and cousins used to stage."I thought, 'Oh my god, it's exactly what we're doing in Poland,'" Lockhart said.
She continues to communicate with Milena and the other girls and plans to get the group back together this summer for another extended workshop.
"It's like running a camp in another country where you don't speak the language," Lockhart said."And it's all because of this kid you met that you really like."
