Background
(Harold) Todd Walker was born on September 25, 1917, in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. He was the son of Harold Charles and Ada Isabel (Neilson) Walker.
(Harold) Todd Walker was born on September 25, 1917, in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. He was the son of Harold Charles and Ada Isabel (Neilson) Walker.
As a teenager, Todd Walker earned money painting backdrops on movie sets, and he learned to study tonalities when called upon to paint the faux finish on the fireplace in the movie Citizen Kane so it would render properly in black-and-white. He also used this time to learn about color mixing by combining leftover paints at the end of the day to create new hues.
Todd Walker began to learn photography sometime in the late 1930s, and after World War II he established a commercial photography studio in Los Angeles. Through most of the 1950s, he was in high demand for his creative advertising work that featured striking visual images and intense colors. During this time Todd Walker began creating a series of highly distinctive nudes that used the Sabattier effect to meld form and surface together. He also spent much time studying the traditional collotype printing process, and Todd Walker was the most prominent of a new breed of photographers who helped revive the popularity of this process.
In 1964 his wife gave him a small offset press, and Todd Walker began to create and publish small editions of books using photolithography to reproduce his own works. He set up his own printing house, the Thumbprint Press, at a time when there was no desktop publishing. His involvement led him to explore the chemistry and mechanics of the offset process in detail, and he experimented at length by doing such things as changing the patterns of the printing dots and overprinting images with multiple colors to achieve extraordinary saturation. Todd Walker was known to have used as many as 35 colors on one image in a medium that traditionally used a standard set of only four colors.
Todd Walker began teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 1966. His interest in creative photographic processes brought him to the attention of Robert Heinecken and Robert W. Fichter at UCLA, and the three co-taught classes for a brief time. In 1970 he accepted a one-year teaching position at the University of Florida. There he worked with photographers Jerry Uelsmann and Douglas Prince as well as printmaker Ken Kerslake, who was at that time using photo-etching techniques in intaglio printmaking. Seven years later Todd Walker moved to Tucson and taught at the University of Arizona before retiring in 1985.
While in Arizona, Todd Walker began working with some of the first Apple computers, and he used his technical skills to create some early 3-D images of his work and to create a book in which the text was mostly generated by the computer (Enthusiasm Strengthens, 1987). He wrote his own computer programs and later made use of software primarily designed for cartography. With these techniques he was able to create digital works that blurred, inverted, and obscured the original image, making it into an expressive rather than detailed representation of reality.
Todd Walker died of cancer in 1998.
Quotations: "Upon closer examination of the photographs I have made over the years, I now see a few that reveal moments when my camera saw far more clearly than I did. I work now to enhance these images and make such moments more visible to myself and perhaps to others." (1977)
Married Betty Mae McNutt, September 11, 1944 (divorced). Children: Kathleen Walker Sobrado, Melanie Jane.