Todd Walker
American, 1917 - 1998
I am a photographer, firmly grounded in the California tradition of photography. That is where I learned photography and worked for many years. The function of working with a camera is to produce not merely an image, as it is now called, but a picture. A dictionary tells me what I mean by those words--image: the optical counterpart of an object produced by a lens; picture: the representation of something in visible or symbolic form.
For me, the image from the camera needs to be transformed into a picture. That transformation is an important part of my work. In addition to being involved with the image while using the camera, I must then concentrate on that image, with my reaction to the illusions that I have about my environment, and form a concrete picture that attempts to describe and delineate my illusion.
When, from among the many incomplete or inadequate pictures that I have done, one seems to support the illusion that I had while using the camera, or now may have, this becomes the particular one from which I evolve my representation of that illusion. Representation: to present again.
In the ``purist'' tradition of photography, this representation of the picture had certain restrictions, and the direct print from the negative was among them. Although I have come from that tradition, I have not gone far. The alteration of my images has to do with light, chemistry, and pigments other than silver. Yet my concern is strongly with the ability of the photographic process to reveal subtle differences in tone, the way that light is reflected and absorbed, and the marvellous extension of vision that results.
I came to photography with the desire to conquer this machine, the camera, and make it my slave. Instead, I have now a respect for it and for other machines as expanders of my awareness. The printing press, the process camera, photomechanical methods are now part of my photography and are teaching me what else is latent in the negative that comes from the camera.
Through all of this I am trying to make pictures, to re-present something in visible and/or symbolic form.
From childhood on, Todd Walker has been interested in photography. He has also been fascinated by machines and by the way things work, understanding them after the briefest examination--a talent that has had a great impact on his development as a photographer. He worked for a time as a painter's apprentice at RKO studios in Hollywood where he observed the creative power of light; he then attended the Art Center School in Los Angeles part-time in order to learn commercial photographic skills. Never content, but always patient, Walker went on to master the skills of each type of photography he encountered. He came from the California School of ``straight'' photography and found a creative outlet in the boom of commercial photography in Southern California in the 1950s, becoming a much admired and sought-after commercial photographer as a result of his knowledge of how to capture reality in an appealing and eye-catching manner. He also studied and experimented with the ``Dorothea Lange'' or documentary school of photography as well as the editorial school, although his participation in these areas was minimal.
While he was at the Art Center School, Walker took a course from Eddie Kaminski which introduced him to cubism and surrealism. By the early 1950s he had achieved sufficient success to allow himself to return to those things which were of private interest to him. According to Susan Cohen, ``Todd's primary drive [is] to match in visual form his personal response to the phenomenal world, to confirm what he calls his `illusion of reality.' '' After a reassessment of his work and goals, Walker gave up the security and prosperity of the commercial world of photography in the late 60s to pursue his own artistic interests, which attests to his strong commitment to his art and to his belief in the ``individual.''
His break with traditional ``straight'' photography and his skill and ingenuity in using such techniques as the Sabbatier line, solarization, posterization, the offset lithographic press or the collotype allow him to play with space, line, motion, alterations in color, repetition, use of blur, etc. By way of experimentation and by mastering such various and diverse techniques, Walker has successfully revitalized the clichéd tropes of the nude and the landscape. In his work with the female nude, for example, he does not dwell on the sexually provocative or the voyeuristic aspect, but rather often creates a soft intimacy with the subjects by placing them in ``caves'' or ``artificial structures'' (in addition to the natural environment) to explore how ``people relate to themselves rather than there being an outside reference to something else.'' It should be noted, perhaps, that his use of diverse techniques is not to correct a ``failed'' image, but to enhance a perfectly good image and give it a new significance.
Walker's photographs are constantly becoming more and more complex--perhaps this is because it is not easy to successfully ``match in visual form [one's increasingly complex] personal response to the phenomenal world.'' Regardless, Walker's photography is exciting and invigorating--whether he is photographing machines, still-lifes, people, leaves or nudes--because he is never afraid to continue experimenting and attempting to redefine the boundaries of modern photography. He has been able to move away from the purely objective to surrealism as an alternative approach to the medium, yet without losing an important link with reality. As William Johnson has noted, ``Todd has always been attracted to surrealism, or rather to a certain aspect of the surrealist message--that there is more to the world than what is physically there; that there can be a world of cause and consequence not structured by normal expectations; that the world can have a sense of poetry, of elusiveness, of mystery that can never be quite categorized or defined.... This sense of the power of mystery is conveyed in his `salt table' photographs in the late 1940s and again in the best of the solarized prints of the later 1960s. Gradually, however, Todd has been able to strip away the forms of surrealism to achieve the substance of its idea. He no longer has to make images that look surreal; now he has reached the point where he can embody the sense of mystery within the most quotidian images.'' Ultimately, then, as is often the case, it is not the specific subject matter which is so important, but the overall coherent effect which the artist has achieved.
"(Harold) Todd Walker." Contemporary Photographers. Gale, 1996. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 21 Feb. 2012.
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