Christian Walker: b. 1953; d.2003

Norman Leon Walker Jr. was born on April 4, 1953. In the late 70s, he changed his first name to Christian and adopted 1954 as his birth year. In 1974, Christian Walker moved to Boston where he spent the next ten years residing primarily in the South End. Walker graduated in 1984 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, paving the way as a gay Black photographer, active in both Boston and Atlanta. He created compelling experimental work that explored the intersections of queer sexuality and race. Walker's artworks, critical analysis, and curatorial pursuits addressed a diverse range of themes, encompassing queer public sexuality, interracial intimacy, HIV/AIDS, censorship, substance abuse, and the portrayal of race dynamics in both public and private image realms. His photographs, critical writings, and curatorial projects are vital contributions to the histories of art and photography of the 20th century.

In the mid-1980s, Walker transitioned from documentary photography to portraiture and later began exploring alternative photographic processes. His new approach included techniques such as multiple exposures, archival appropriation, and the integration of paint and nontraditional materials. Despite receiving substantial critical and curatorial acclaim during his lifetime, Walker's work has largely remained unrecognized since his untimely death in 2003. He passed away in relative obscurity, and it is believed that his archive may have been lost or destroyed.

Recently there has been a notable increase of interest in his work. Presently, an exhibition titled "Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant" is on display at the Tufts University Gallery at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. This exhibition, originally showcased at the Leslie Lohman Museum, marks a pivotal moment in bringing Walker's art to a broader audience. Co-curated by Jackson Davidow and Noam Parness, the exhibition offers a comprehensive exploration of Walker's oeuvre.

Walker’s work is included in the collections of The High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Center for Creative Photography, the ONE Archives, and the Hammonds House Museum. His writing appeared in Fag Rag, ART PAPERS, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, SF Camerawork, and the book Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (1994, ed. Deborah Willis).

Christian Walker’s earliest photographs are portraits of his family, members of Boston’s gay community, and residents at the group home for people with mental disabilities where he worked. These early works were heavily influenced by the photographs of Diane Arbus.

During Christian Walker’s time at SMFA he took courses in photography, film, and drawing in the early 80s. Even though Walker had been photographing in Boston since he first moved, it was during his last semester at SMFA that he started his first major series, The Theater Project, about a nighttime community of the Pilgrim Theater, an X-rated theater in Boston’s redlight district. An area known as the “Combat Zone.” The Pilgrim Theater screened straight pornography but attracted an overwhelmingly gay audience and provided a space for those searching for homosexual encounters, whether openly gay or those who were closeted. The photographs capture an impressionistic journey: from beneath the marquee and through foyers, across a sprawling orchestra pit, past brass-railed balconies and loges, to connecting stairways and downstairs urinals. Sparsely scattered throughout the venue, ghostly figures of men and trans feminine individuals of various races linger—intoxicated, hopeful, disillusioned—seeking sex, connection, and sustenance. The series was first exhibited at C.A.G.E. Gallery in 1983 and published by Nexus Press in 1985.

In 1984 or 1985, Walker made the move to Atlanta, drawn by his soon to be boyfriend Ron Renz and the prospect of publishing The Theater Project as a book. Walker soon became involved in the artistic communities of Nexus and began to experiment by appropriating imagery and text and applying dry pigments or varnish. He also wrote prolifically for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Art Papers, continuing the political and social critique he had begun in Boston.

Performance Counts can be viewed as an extension of Walker's street photography in Boston's Combat Zone. He observed the dynamics between black and white individuals in downtown Atlanta, especially in the Five Points district. Glenn Harper, editor of Art Papers, remarked on this series, stating, "Some striking images in the collection separate a Black individual from a white counterpart on the same street, highlighting the disparity in their worlds through distance, composition, and applied pigments."

Walker's series Mule Tales developed from his enduring fascination with racial humor in white popular culture. The prints are divided into two sections, separated either horizontally or vertically by a black line. One section showcases a silver gelatin print of a rephotographed provocative pulp novel cover from the 1960s, while the other presents racial jokes sourced from historical materials. He found that minorities did not have jokes in the dominant culture and after research found a book called Negro Jokes For Intelligent White People from 1963 and a book called Mule Tales In Its Relation to Dixie Darkies from 1942. He coupled these texts with images from lurid paperbacks that depict violence or sexuality. Due to the layers of pigment and varnish covering each piece, deciphering both the image and text can be challenging to comprehend their juxtaposition outside of their original context.