What has become of the fabled Walden Pond? In his debut monograph Walden, published by Kehrer Verlag, S.B. Walker an artist from New England (USA) who grew up a few miles from Walden Pond surveys the symbolically charged landscape of literary giant Henry David Thoreau in an attempt to find out the answer. The publication of Walker’s book marks the bicentennial of Thoreau’s life.
Deeply rooted in the American collective conscious, Walden Pond is a mythical place perceived as wild and often considered to be the birthplace of the modern environmental movement. The contemporary Walden depicted in Walker’s photographs is perhaps best characterized as a glorified suburban park, nestled amongst the sprawl of metropolitan Boston. As our awareness of the place is largely derived from Thoreau’s rhapsodic description some 150 years ago ,writings in which he often drew connections between New England and the pastoral Arcadian landscape portrayed by the Roman poet Virgil, the state of affairs as shown in Walker’s Walden reveals a thought provoking and troubling paradox.
In an essay in the book, author Alan Trachtenberg writes: “… [Thoreau’s] Walden Pond is a place of still, pristine waters and natural processes of seasonal change, of blossoming and dying, of regeneration into new life … Walker’s pictures, on the other hand, show something gone seriously wrong at this cherished site, a monument to American idealism itself …”
In Walker’s Walden we see a place populated by locals and tourists who flock to the hallowed spot to bird-watch, swim, nap, read, fish, and take a stroll in the woods. Signs of the encroachment of modern life are seen in the presence of wire fences, eroded pathways, chain saw markings, parking lots, a landfill just 1,200 feet from the edge of the pond, and a bulldozer poised to clear the way for a highway expansion project. The last image in Walden captures the liberated waters of the pond following an ice melt, a scene that would be sublime if it were not for the presence of a Target shopping bag floating on the pond’s surface in the foreground.
An aura of melancholy sweeps through Walker’s photographs suggesting the absence of a sense of well-being. Trachtenberg writes: “This seems like a frozen Walden, a freeze too deep to be redeemed by first aid alone … by claiming ‘Walden’ for his title, [Walker] offers Thoreau, and through him the entire tradition of American romanticism, a formative role in his own extraordinary book. Walker’s pictures are layered against each other to reveal an unrelenting vision of disenchantment with what Walden Pond once represented to enthralled Americans.”
S.B. Walker, Walden
Published by Kehrer Verlag
$40.00 / €35,00
