Digital Photography as an Alternative Process
Among practitioners of digital media there has been a resurgent interest in excavating and revaluating 19th century imaging technologies. This must not be read as nostalgia for a quieter, less frothy age and a love of quaint patinas; nor should we interpret it as hesitation at the threshold of some imagined revolutionary advance in digital technology. Rather, it emerges from the realization that important changes we’re experiencing now – how we fix images and how and where we look at them – is a reflection of a greater upheaval that occurred a mere hundred and seventy years ago. Between 1830 and 1890 dozens of varied and competitive techniques were developed using soups of gelatin, egg white, organic and inorganic chemicals to automatically transform light and shadow into images. All but one of these chemical techniques are now collectively referred to as “alternative processes,” a term that tells us little about the methods and tends to marginalize work that uses them. Our own era, too, is one of multiplicity and transition: varied and competitive formats and technologies for digitizing, editing and printing appear and vanish from the marketplace more rapidly than any consumer can devour – alternative processes, indeed. From where we stand it is hard to imagine that in between have been long and successive decades of relative stability and satisfaction, or to understand by what confluences of individual curiosity and corporate determination these new tools of visualization develop and emerge.
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. Born in Salt Lake City, reared in Los Angeles, Walker had come to photography as a professional: after high school and after his father died suddenly, he worked as a painter’s apprentice in the scenic studios at RKO Pictures in Hollywood, painting faux marbled interiors for Citizen Kaneand polishing floors for Fred Astaire in order to help support his mother and sister. He took one summer course at The Art Center School in Los Angeles and shortly thereafter joined the Army Air Corps where he served as a flight instructor in Tucson. After the war he launched a career as a selftaught, successful and acclaimed commercial photographer in Los Angeles, a career he abandoned at the age of fifty to devote himself to art and teaching after a one man exhibition at the LA Museum of Science and Industry. Strongly motivated to find a new way of seeing, Walker first embraced “alternative processes” and soon thereafter the digital media that were to form the substance of his later work.
Walker’s dissatisfaction with commercial photography extended beyond the limitations it imposed on content and expression, to the technical bounds imposed by commercially available gelatin-silver prints. “For me the image from the camera needs to be transformed into a picture. That transformation is an important part of my work.” Toward this end of transformation he spent the better part of a decade working with and teaching alternative photographic processes. He explored the possibilities of cyanotypes, Van Dyke prints, albumen tempera prints and, via collotype to print work with a small offset lithographic press.
One alternative approach to photography became central to his practice in this period and, conceptually, to his digital work: the Sabattier effect (often referred to as “solarization”) – exposing a partially developed negative to light, then continuing its development to completion, resulting in a reversal of tones and accentuation of boundaries between light and dark areas. First discovered in 1857, it was not scientifically explained until 1988, well after Walker had moved completely into the digital domain. The Sabattier process presented Walker a way of rendering visible what he referred to as the “line drawn by light” and it is this line that we see running through his work – as figure, as boundary, as texture and as color-shift. Walker carried over the look of the Sabatier effect in his digital work by subtle application of Laplacian filter algorithms.
Walker’s first encounter with a computer took place in the late nineteen-fifties when he was hired to photograph a top-secret mainframe at the RAND Corporation. Aware at the time of the computer’s potential for image processing, he suspected that it would someday supplant the camera he’d used to document it. When, in the early nineteen eighties, he made the leap, it was with the conviction that the individual artist could create the tools and software to carry out this task. After his first experiments with Apple Basic, Walker bought an IBM PC with a TARGA imaging card and taught himself C to create his own image processing software. He was a proponent and adherent of open systems, self reliant shareware and he used a variety of tools put in the public domain, including early ray-tracing and cartographic software packages. Their stamp may be seen in many of the digital images in this exhibition. He used these tools in his own way, to extend his vision and clarify his seeing. Walker used and recycled his black and white negatives through successive stages of optical, photochemical and digital processing. Negatives from the nineteen-sixties, like “Pearl” a statuesque redhead model outside the frame of conventional beauty, reappear and are recast as photographs, lithographs, digital prints and even needlepoint pillowcases, over a period of three decades. Many of the digital images’ titles reflect the era of their production: cryptic, eight letter filenames, serve as mnemonic for both source material and transformation.
While form and luminosity pass through the lens and onto film with an optical accuracy, color occupies an ambiguous position in hotography. Three-color approximations of our own suggestible color vision always elude accuracy and rarely satisfy. Commercial dye formulations change with fashion and demographics. Todd Walker used everything but color film to produce his work. “Much of my exploration of photography for the past twenty years has been as a colorist. Rather than accepting the ‘correct’ way to present a photographic image in color, I have used the lens image often for its tonality to become the modulator for my own color attitudes and seeing.” Walker’s color sense developed, he recounted, while playing with the leftovers of paint at RKO. His unique approach to color finds its vibrant peak in the works he printed on his small offset press. “Opuntia,” a small self-published book of cactus images pushed from black and white negative thru the cribleof digitization, re-photographed from the computer screen onto Polaroid color separations, burned onto litho plates and printed on paper with hand mixed inks, manages to excite the pulsating color neurons of our desert vision more accurately than any optically traceable process. Todd Walker’s small press projects extend and develop his photographic work, deftly blending text, sequence, binding and spine with transformed images.
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 three decades gathered together in its original context reaffirms the role of the artist as innovator, and makes clear Walker’s remarkable journey.
Paul DeMarinis
Artist & Professor of Art
Stanford University
2004