Courtesy Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

Sharon Lockhart, still from "LUNCH BREAK" (2008). 35 mm transfer to HD video, 79 min.

   November 2008 Field Guide

William Eggleston

Anton Kannemeyer

The Brussels Dream

Lynne Marsh

Frances Stark

Donald Rodney

Oranges and Sardines

Renzo Martens

Dóra Maurer

Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai

Stephan Balkenhol

Terence Gower

Jacques Bedel

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Charles C. Ebbets’s iconic American photograph of a crew of grimy workers eating lunch on a steel crossbeam, their feet dangling 69 stories above the New York City streets, could stand as a fitting epigraph to “LUNCH BREAK,” a new film and photographic series about the bleak state of US labor, by artist Sharon Lockhart. Lockhart’s film documents communal lunch hours in various New England labor communities, while her photos show the employees hard at work. The parallels between her project and Ebbets’s photo are remarkable: Ebbets took his picture in 1932, during the funereal reality of the Great Depression (13,000,000 unemployed, nearly every bank closed); the following year, Franklin D. Roosevelt would be elected, brokering the New Deal to provide unemployment relief and vast reform of the banking systems. Lockhart’s series—made during a recent Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellowship and premiering this month in a show at Secession—was undertaken during an unemployment, health-care, and banking crisis that, at the time of this writing, the US presidential candidates were vowing to address.

"Sharon Lockhart" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.