Photography Exhibition Todd Walker at 100: Frank Gohlke, Speeding Trucks and Other Follies

American photographer Todd Walker, who died in 1998, was a prolific photographer, printmaker, and book artist who is best known for his layered, manipulated prints and his use of offset lithography and screenprinting. He revived and reinterpreted 19th century photographic processes, and later experimented with early digital photography made possible by the first Apple computers. An exhibition at Etherton Gallery in Tucson Arizona, symbolically celebrates his 100 anniversary. Named after his forthcoming book, Speeding Trucks and Other Follies (Steidl, 2018), it also brings together three bodies of work by preeminent landscape photographer Frank Gohlke. Made during 1971-1972, they establish his early and abiding sensitivity to the landscapes of ordinary life. Etherton Gallery is the first venue to show this body of work. Photographs of Bears Ears National Monument by photographer and former astronomer Stephen Strom are as well on display in the in-house pop-up gallery. All three photographers taught in their respective fields at the University of Arizona.

Although less well-known than some of his colleagues, Todd Walker was part of a group of photographers including Robert Heinecken, and Robert Fichter who were engaged in questioning photographic conventions established by Beaumont Newhall and Ansel Adams. Walker left behind a successful 25-year career as an advertising photographer, with clients such as Ford, Chevrolet, Lockheed and Bank of America to pursue an interest in the transformational possibilities of photography. His experiments with 19th century processes anticipated the return to “alternative processes” as they became known in the 21st century. His experiments with silkscreen and offset lithography paralleled the interests of Pop Artists Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Finally, Walker predicted the rise of digital photography and the demise of the 20th century darkroom processes that had come to define the medium.

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