Todd Walker Day
L062 13X16,
1976,
©
© Walker Image Estate,
When
11 a.m. Sept. 25, 2013
Where
Center for Creative Photography Auditorium
In celebration of the 96th anniversary of Todd’s birth, the Center for Creative Photography declares Wednesday, September 25, Todd Walker Day!
11:00am and 4:00pm
Gallery Talk
Melanie Walker, Todd’s daughter and Associate Professor, IMAP and Photography, University of Colorado at Boulder
Todd Walker was an American photographer, printmaker and creator of artists’ books who is known for his manipulated images and for his use of offset lithography to produce individual prints and limited-edition books of his work.
Walker began teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 1966. His interest in creative photographic processes brought him to the attention of Robert Heinecken and Robert W. Fichter at UCLA, and the three co-taught classes for a brief time. In 1970, Walker accepted a one-year teaching position at the University of Florida. There he worked with photographers Jerry Uelsmann and Douglas Prince as well as printmaker Ken Kerslake, who was at that time using photo-etching techniques in intaglio printmaking. Walker taught a photo-printmaking class and a silkscreen class. In an interview in the late 1970s, Walker said, “The contact with the ideas of the printmaker have greatly altered my attitudes toward photography, and how each discipline deals with an image.” Seven years later, he moved to Tucson and taught at the University of Arizona before retiring in 1985.
While in Arizona, Walker began working with some of the first Apple computers, and he used his technical skills to create some early 3-D images of his work and to create a book in which the text was mostly generated by the computer (Enthusiasm Strengthens, 1987). According to his daughter, Walker never used Photoshop or other commercial imaging software. He wrote his own computer programs and later made use of software primarily designed for cartography. With these techniques he was able to create digital works that blurred, inverted, and obscured the original image, making it into an expressive rather than detailed representation of reality.