NEW YORK—As a curator, it’s hard not to get the story of how you acquired or didn’t acquire something mixed up with the actual picture itself, so that the image that originally grabbed you gets all jumbled together with good or bad memories of the subsequent chase. There are a few works of art out there that I tried but failed to acquire for the Met, and when I come upon them unexpectedly now, they make me wince—like finding the snapshot of an old girlfriend between the pages of a book. Happily, this is not one of those stories.

It had been one of those all-too-familiar afternoons of gallery-going when you trek endlessly from one disappointing show to the next, and then, when you’re least expecting it, you get hit over the head with something that gives you hope. The reviews of the Sharon Lockhart show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in 1996 had intrigued me, but when I got there on the last day I was still totally shocked by what I saw. The photographs were large-scale and color, and this was before the format had become so prevalent. Lockhart’s images were dazzlingly seen, composed, and produced, yet totally understated and ambiguous: Here were young people seemingly paused in between moments, not so much contemplative in expression as perhaps stopping to remember something; and they were set in interiors where each individual detail seemed to have its own incandescent inner life. The work upset the traditional emphasis of figure over ground, but in a totally natural, unforced way. The pictures looked completely modern, yet like Vermeers.

By the time I arrived at the end of the last day of the show, the exhibition had completely sold out, but in 2004 we got another chance. In the eight-year interim, the big color photograph had almost become a form of official salon art, similar to the good old-fashioned figurative painting and quirky, obsessional drawings that served as post-9/11 comfort food. But Lockhart’s photographs remained as haunting and thought-provoking as they had nearly a decade earlier.

The 1996 untitled photograph by the artist that the Met ultimately acquired—to be featured this fall in the new Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography—shows a young man in a hotel room during the crepuscular “magic hour” separating day from night. Lockhart’s image is a remarkable reading lesson in the nature of photographic representation: The hallucinatory play of reflections and doublings across a grid of windows seems to thrust the protagonist forward into our space, so that he stands with us before this rain-soaked bedroom/skyline that merges interior and exterior—imagination and reality—onto a single plane. And the camera effortlessly produces significance and drama from each individually banal detail, from the American flag to the aircraft warning lights to the wrinkles on the young man’s shirt.

Ultimately, Lockhart’s picture—intentionally uneventful yet unquestionably seductive and intriguing—is about the process of perception that we bring to it. Her self-conscious use of “cinematic” devices recalls Cindy Sherman’s pioneering faked movie stills, which probed how the endlessly repeated and recombined elements of fictional film actively shape our perceptions of self and the world. Yet if Lockhart’s expanded scale and high production values suggest both CinemaScope vision and the billboard advertisement, her scenarios are less about melodramatic expression than the precise point at which the everyday and the imagined intersect. She is interested in that moment when the quotidian and ineffable are synched together in an endless loop, the “Is it live or is it Memorex?” of contemporary experience as simultaneously lived and imagined. In the decade since this work was made, what the artist had depicted so subtly and almost invisibly—the total permeation of advertising and publicity techniques into the deepest recesses of private, intimate experience—has become, with the replacement of analog by digital technology and the tsunami-like spread of the Internet, a grotesque shadow play of pseudo-participation and expression. As such, Lockhart’s photograph is an important statement on the nature of subjective experience in our time.