Sharon Lockhart's 'Lunch Break' - NY/LA through 1/30/10

Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard. Contrary to her previous films, the camera is untethered and, as it slowly moves down the corridor, we experience what was a brief interval in the workday schedule expanded into a sustained gaze. Lined with lockers, the hallway seems not only an industrial nexus but also a social one, its surfaces containing a history of self-expression and customization. Over the course of the lunch break we see workers engaged in a wide range of activities--reading, sleeping, talking--in addition to actually eating their midday meal. The real-time soundtrack is a composition designed in collaboration with composer Becky Allen and filmmaker James Benning, in which industrial sounds, music, and voices slowly merge and intertwine. Together, picture and sound provide an extended meditation on a moment of respite from productive labor.

...

The photographic component of Lunch Break consists of twenty-seven photographs separated into three distinct bodies of work. A set of tableaus in which workers interact around both makeshift and institutional dining tables give us a sense of the various ways workers engage the social space. A collection of the various independent businesses workers have established to provide coffee, hot dogs, candy bars and snacks depicts the makeshift architectures and micro-economies allowed to exist within the larger factory structure. Finally, a series of eighteen more formalized still-lives of the workers’ lunch boxes serve as portraits of their owners and an archive of the trades that contribute to the construction of a ship. In each case, the worker is both framed by and frames the work place.