Pine flat. Ediz. illustrata - Tapa dura

Created over the course of three years in a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Pine Flat is Sharon Lockhart's first project to center on a community in the United States. Working without a film crew so that she could better immerse herself in the life of the town, Lockhart has created a formally concise yet intimate view of contemporary rural life that focuses on the interactions of the community's children, who engage in everyday activities in stunningly beautiful natural landscapes.
The book - conceived as a companion work to the film, sound, and photographic components that comprise the project - includes stills and a series of nineteen large-format portraits inspired in part by the 19th-centruty American tradition of the portrait photographer. Although personal, these images transcend individual specificity to approach the status of archetypes, evoking a wide range of art historical references, from Edouard Manet to August Sander.

In the film and photographic series "Pine Flat" constructed over a three year period, Sharon Lockhart addresses the experience of an American childhood, using the stunning landscape of America's Sierra Nevada Mountains to bring home the close relationships of children with their natural surroundings. Lockhart began by constructing a portrait studio in a small rural community, and extending an open invitation to local children, and then by immersing herself in their environment and noting the complexity of their interactions. Her highly descriptive, almost painterly portraits, taken over the course of several years, abjure narration for the pleasure of the gaze and the notion of temporality. The studio remains a constant, its black backdrop, cement floor and natural lighting; a theatrical setting that allows the children to develop a different kind of relationship to the camera. Those stills stand in stark contrast to the pictorialism of a series showing the community's majestic natural surroundings, and to the portraits on 16mm film that accompany them, which are both literally and figuratively moving.