PHOTOGRAPHS
Lockhart, Sharon
U.S. (1964 - )
Enrique Nava Enedina: Oaxacan Exhibit Hall, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City
1999
Chromogenic color print
47 3/8 x 60 1/8 in. (120.3 x 152.7 cm) exposed image size; 49 1/16 x 61 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. (124.6 x 156.2 x 5.7 cm) frame size; 49 1/16 x 217 1/2 in. (124.6 x 552.5 cm) installed size
Gift of William and Ruth True
FA 2000.52.1

Sharon Lockhart works in the tradition of ethnographic research, making photographic and filmic works that visually describe the individual customs and cultures of her subjects, from shipyard workers in Maine on their lunch break to children playing in the courtyards of Warsaw, Poland. In the early triptych here, Lockhart turns her camera on Enrique Nava Enedina, a mason who is repairing the floor of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Mr. Enedina is framed behind a protective barrier in a way that parallels the cultural artifacts in the case behind him. This frame-within-a-frame composition mirrors how the camera structures the act of looking, as well as how museum display shapes meaning and value. The effect probes the implications of the gaze between self and other that characterizes ethnographic study and interpretation, as well as the risk of photographic practices to turn subjects into fixed objects. Mr. Enedina actively returns the gaze of the camera, suggesting a mutual encounter that resists this fixity and complicates the relationship between viewer and viewed.

Label copy for The Time. The Place. Contemporary Art from the Collection, November 4, 2017 to March 25, 2018.