Lockhart’s Goshogaoka, a breakthrough success, is an early-career experiment with time, movement, ritual, and chance that blurs the boundary between documentary and performance-based filmmaking. A Los Angeles–based photographer and filmmaker, Lockhart has created moving-image work that builds on the pioneering cinema of the Lumière brothers, the Structuralist films of Michael Snow and James Benning, the ethnographic studies of anthropologists Robert Gardner and Jean Rouch, and the fictional narratives of filmmakers like Jean Eustache, John Cassavetes, Robert Bresson, and François Truffaut. Painstakingly choreographed and edited, Lockhart’s works are also rooted in diverse traditions of dance, theater, photography, and sculpture, from Japanese Noh dramas to the photorealist sculptures of Duane Hanson. Lockhart ennobles her subjects, whether clam diggers and factory workers in her native Maine, farmers in Japan, indigenous tribal people in the Amazon, or a dance composer and textile artist in Israel. Even as she remains deeply connected to Western histories of portraiture, landscape, and still life, she confronts the vexing questions of class and race that underlie these traditions.

After spending months observing a middle school girls’ basketball team in suburban Japan, for Goshogaoka Lockhart choreographed the team’s drills and turned them into six filmed takes, each of them ten minutes long and shot with a fixed camera at court level. Her fascination with childhood and adolescence—transitional stages of development in which awkwardness and confidence are uninhibitedly on display—has been an abiding theme throughout her career.