HE WENT DIGITAL BEFORE DIGITAL WAS COOL

Article Last Updated: 03/13/2008 11:29:43 PM MDT

By the time Todd Walker retired from teaching at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1985, he was already a highly regarded photographer with works in dozens of major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But rather than rest on his laurels and take it easy, he devoted himself to some of the most daring and innovative experimentation of his career, venturing more heavily into the nascent world of digital photography, which he had begun exploring in 1981.

The fascinating and in many ways groundbreaking fruits of those investigations, which ended in 1998 with his death, are showcased in "Critical Encounters," an exhibition running through April 12 at the Sandra Phillips Gallery.

The show features nearly 30 digital images printed posthumously in limited editions of 12 by his daughter, Melanie. An associate professor of art at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she teaches historical photographic processes.

The week before her father died, he gave her about 1,000 of his digital files and, in 2003, she received a grant from the Judith Rothschild Foundation in New York to create prints of all the images they contained.

With the exception of "MARIVAR" (1996), which was shown in the late 1990s in a traveling exhibition organized by Nash Editions, most of these photographs have not been exhibited previously except perhaps in local Arizona exhibitions.

Walker did not like to title his pieces because he was afraid of unduly influencing viewers' interpretations of the work. So, Melanie simply adopted her father's often indecipherable, abbreviated file names as titles for the images she selected.

Born in 1917 in Salt Lake City, he grew up in Los Angeles, where he established himself as a commercial photographer in the 1940s. In the 1960s, he delved into alternative photographic methods, such as solarization, inventing his own visual language.

In 1966, he began teaching photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and, around that time, he started exhibiting extensively, including dozens of solo exhibitions nationwide. In 1970, he gave up his commercial studio and focused exclusively on his fine-art imagery.

Because digital photography has become so ubiquitious and sophisticated, it is important to realize that Walker began his work in the digital realm nine years before Adobe shipped its first copies of Photoshop 1.0, a revolutionary software program that transformed the field.

According to his daughter, Walker never used Photoshop. Instead, he wrote his own computer programs and later made use of QFX freeware and POV, or Persistence of Vision, software primarily designed for cartography.

This latter program was likely used in the creation of "BUSMM" (1997), and helps explain its sharply three-dimensional feel. It is one of the most eye-grabbing images in the exhibition, with a contoured, semi-abstracted male head thrusting toward the viewer from a kind of crystalline, purplish background.

Like the other selections, it has a slightly primitive quality in comparison with today's sleek digital imagery, but, if anything, that only enhances its appeal. Whatever their comparative technical deficiencies, all these images still look novel and different.

While Walker's 1980s images are probably important from a historical point of view, the later, more complex works from the 1990s like "BUSMM" are the most compelling aesthetically.

Other striking examples include "WIJAN" (1996), with a female bust, with bright red lips, jutting toward the viewer; "CCFAC2" (1997), with its chunky fragmentation; and "WRAITH" (1995), a highly colorful, pixelated depiction of an angel.

Because Walker worked largely in isolation and most of his images from that time have not been seen, it is hard to assess where his experimentation fits into a history of digital photography that is still barely mapped.

But don't be surprised — once experts have a chance to assess this work — to see him gain a notable place in the story, adding another major component to an already substantial artistic legacy.

 

"Critical Encounters"

Photography. Sandra Phillips Gallery, 744 Santa Fe Drive. An exhibition of nearly 30 pioneering digital photographs from 1981 through 1998 by Todd Walker. Through April 12. 12:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays and 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays. Free. 303-573-5969 or thesandraphillipsgallery.com. Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com