Todd Walker, Anticipating Digital

Anticipating Digital features the prescient work of Center for Creative Photography archive artist Todd Walker (1917-1998). The exhibition examines three decades of Walker’s work, highlighting his early use of computers to digitize images, and features examples of Walker’s use of alternate printing methods including offset lithos, silkscreens, Collotypes, self-published artist books and portfolios.

Todd Walker was one of the first photographers to embrace and make artistic use of digital imaging technologies. In 1981, long before digital imaging was defined as a collection of visual devices, tools, and practices, Walker had purchased an Apple II computer and was writing software in Basic to digitize, modify, and output his photographs into a panoply of print media. During the two decades that Walker followed his digital muse, countless industrial and desktop applications of press-ready digital imaging mushroomed around us. Todd Walker, ever the pathfinder, pursued his own vision of what the medium of digital photography might become. Like the views recorded by early explorers of a continent, Walker’s digital work discloses a few sights that have since become familiar, far more that remain rare and unknown still, and several that have been absorbed into the ruling taste of commercial software. Seeing his work of the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s gathered together in its original context reaffirms the role of the artist as innovator, and makes clear Walker’s remarkable journey.