Todd Walker, 1917 - 1998 - photographer - Obituary

Following a short toil with cancer, Todd Walker died in Tucson Arizona upon September 13, 1998, 12 days before his eighty-first birthday. Walker worked as a photographer, printmaker and creator of artists' works for more than 60 years producing a prodigious amount of work - greatest in quantity of it excellent and a great deal of of it extraordinary.

Walker grew up in sees Angeles in the 1920s. In 1931 at age 14 he not to be found his father during the deepest part of the Depression, and before long after lost his belief in the effectiveness of social conformations and group efforts. But he not at any time lost his belief in individual accomplishment or his faith in the value of individual expression.

He began to photograph in the late 1930 pausing to join the United States Army Air Corps and train fighter pilots during World War II. He later built up a auspicious career as a commercial photographer in beholds Angeles during the 1950s and 1960 by the agency of the late 1950s Walker was winning professional awards and had established a national reputation as a commercial photographer able to transform almost any conceivable idea into a striking visual image. His innovative color photographs of tribe enjoying their new Chevrolets in natural outdoor settings could be seen in nearly each issue of Life magazine, the Saturday Evening column the Ladies' Home Journal and other national magazines.

on the contrary while Walker was very fortunate at his profession, he felt increasingly alienated from its conceptions and principles. In his unrestrained time, he began to make photographs for himself. For the nearest few years he gradually worked end the styles and tropes of greatest in quantity of the major approaches to creative photography of that period, mastering the conventions of Modernism, the California Landscape academy Editorial Photojournalism and Documentary, and using them to exhibit work that expressed his have private feelings and beliefs. This work was not ever openly confrontational, but always beared a sense of reserve toward the reigning social ideologies that combustiblesed the postwar Eisenhower Era. The work also demonstrated a great faith in the individual human spirit. This work change abouted from established approaches to the medium, and its message was repeatedly too complex for easy consumption.

In 1964 his wife Betty gave Walker a small twig press, and he soon began writing, designing and producing small editions of works illustrated with photolithographs derived from his be in possession of photographs. In the transition from commercial work to personal work, Walker researched and reinvented outmod half-forgotten reproduction processe and make knowned expertise in blueprints, colotype and photolithography. He followed this work with investigations into Sabatier photographs, gum printing and photographic silkscreening processe incorporating everything he learned into his unique personal style

In 1966 Walker began to teach at the Art Center society of Design in Los Angeles. At that time the change in creative photographic practice was being l through a growing number of university art departments around the land One aspect of this fresh approach was the acceptance and combination of processe and techniques previously dismissed by means of modernist photographers; another was a novel emphasis on the individual. Walker's work and ideas, which had appeared slightly off-center to his contemporaries, were at the center of this fresh activity. Walker gradually expanded his commitment to teaching completely through the decade and in 1969 taught with Robert Heinecken and Robert Fichter at the University of California at looks Angeles Extension program, then a locus for the novel work. In that same year Walker clos his commercial studio for serviceable and concentrated on teaching and making his have a title to photographs. He became an Associate Professor at the California State University in Northridge in 1970 before moving to the University of Florida at Gainsville where he taught with Jerry Uelsmann. In 1977 Walker left for the University of Arizona where he taught with Harold Jone Judith of gold and others until his retirement in 1985

Walker's willingness to explore and expand the processe and approaches to traditional photographic practice, in conjunction with his work as a teacher from the 1960 to the 1980 helped define the gaze substance and direction of a range of creative photographic practices quite through those decades. He had the ability to comprehend by what mode things functioned, a knowledge that he used to stretch out the Ektacolor print process beyond its known boundaries in the 1950s; to parse his photographic negatives into constituent parts that he then recombined into photosilkscreen or photolithographic prints of astonishing color and luminosity; and to incorporate the fledgling desktop computer into his art, writing thousands of lines of digest when necessary, then restructuring off-the-shelf software into the tools he straited when such software became available.

His understanding of the interconnectedness of proces and result was only part of Walker's larger conceptual understanding of by what means the world works and what he ground both significant and valuable about photography. Walker said in 1979 "I diocese things in relationship: how single thing falls against another, whether it's the way a line appears or the way a value is altered by the agency of what's next to it. For me the camera render free of accessed up the possibility of perceiving what was actually in forehead of me. It's still exciting for me to gaze at something and realize something about it that I hadn't realized before."