Christopher Lockett is a Los Angeles based Director of Photography, photographer and singer-songwriter. A native of Woodbridge, Virginia, he holds a BA in English Literature from Clemson University and an MFA in Cinematography from the American Film Institute.
A standout in high school football and track and field, Lockett went to Clemson on an athletic scholarship, specializing in the pole vault and decathlon. When that career was cut short due to injuries, he took up cinema, photography, literature and music with the same passion he brought to athletics.
While still in undergrad, Lockett began writing for folk and traditional world music magazines like Dirty Linen and Sing Out, interviewing blues greats like Buddy Guy, John Hammond and Honeyboy Edwards. He covered alt-country, world music and indie rock for various other publications, was a semi-finalist in Rolling Stone’s Collegiate Journalist Of The Year Awards and parlayed that into a job writing and photographing for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Along with the usual assortment of newsmakers both local and international, he interviewed punk rock legend Joey Ramone on a radio show the day that Kurt Cobain’s body was found.
Soon thereafter, despite having already published hundreds of photographs at a major American daily newspaper, Lockett found himself dissatisfied with the quality of his own photography. So he made an intense study of fine art photography and photojournalism, mentored by great Bulgarian/Czech photographer Ilia Varcev.
Lockett soon realized he enjoyed the visual storytelling of photography much more than the journalistic writing form. So off to film school he went. First to the International Film and Television Workshops in Rockport, Maine, then to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He worked as a Teaching Assistant at both schools.
Lockett shot the first HD thesis ever shot at AFI, on the Sony Cine Alta F-900, in 2002. He has shot every permutation of HD ever since. An active still photographer when he’s not on set, Lockett shoots DSLR, 35mm, 35mm Panoramic, 6×6 medium format and 4×5 large format photography, has exhibited locally in Los Angeles and has photographed album covers, promo art and concert photography. He is, as both a photographer and cinematographer, completely at home in a digital or a traditional film environment.
Lockett’s documentary work has taken him to Canada, Mexico, Ireland, London, Paris, Guatemala and Haiti, as well as to Mali and Cote D’Ivoire in West Africa. Being a Southerner who appreciates a good story, he’s got dozens of tales from each place. “Learning how to handle being arrested in a developing nation is an essential skill,” he says. He finds that documentaries dovetail nicely with both his journalist training and his narrative storytelling cinematography training. “Plus,” he says, “I get to say things like ‘Yeah, I’ve been to Timbuktu. Want to see some photos?’ in casual conversation.”
But as a bona fide story junkie, Lockett’s greatest love is narrative film. To him, narrative is the greatest combination of literature, photography, music and physical action ever invented. He maintains a collection of several hundred art books and monographs for reference material and has made extensive studies in color theory. The geek factor of the always-emerging new technology can be pretty high at times, but the story is always the thing.
The films he has photographed have done well on the festival circuit, playing the LA Short Film Fest, River Run, Atlanta Film Festival, HD Fest, Columbus, Hong Kong, Rome, Berlin International Women’s Film Festival and Cinemasia in Amsterdam as well as PBS television. His work in reality TV has been on CBS, Bravo, TLC, FOX, BBC, NBC, ABC, etc. Awards include Best Short and Best Documentary at some of those fests as well as a Regional Addy Award.
His philosophy? ”What I want to do most, regardless of shooting format or distribution method, is move people… to their core. Body, mind and soul. I’m looking for the right film and filmmaking collaborators to do that. As often as possible.”