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THE PROCESS
Walker shoots his photomontages usually from one spot, handheld, without locking the camera down using a tripod. “I use a telephoto lens and start out trying capture frames of a scene that are most interesting. Later, I try to make sure that I have coverage to complete the entire picture.” Focus, exposure, depth of field, all of the aspects of regular photography are involved. But photomontage allows the element of the passage of time to enter the artwork. “I often have to work fast,” he says. “The light can quickly change. The light changes, shadows move, clouds do too.” The final image is usually quite different from the original scene. And often the final picture is the result of a happy accident.
Once, while Walker was shooting the giant Goodyear Blimp, the wind shifted. The enormous airship was tethered to a pole and it swung around 180 degrees. “I just kept shooting,” says Walker. The final picture has TWO blimps, nose to nose. We are actually seeing both sides of it.
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Travel often provides inspiration. “I’ve shot in a dozen national parks, many cities and in a number of European countries. Sometimes I feel like I’m stocking up on material to occupy me, making photomontages through the periods when I’m in the studio.”
“I split myself into different people to get one of these things made,” says the artist. “First, there is the photographer. The job that he does, good or bad, is handed off the next “person” – the assembler. This aspect of me is like a painter, “ Walker says. “He spends hours using the photographs, almost like paint, to create a coherent tableau.” There is another person, too – the finisher. Once the creative work is done the finisher’s job is glue the picture together, faithfully completing artistic vision as accurately as possible. “I work finishing the picture from the back,” Walker says. Like the tapestry makers of old, the final picture can’t be seen until the gluing is complete and the artwork is at last turned over. Any mistakes or transpositions of the photo prints in the picture are hard to correct. It is much easier to get it right the first time.
Each step in the process is critical. Unlike working with a computer, every step is an irreversible physical action. Walker writes, “I often joke that I want to call the treatise about my work, ‘No Undo Function.’ "
Whether reassembling a jumble of individual prints, gluing layers of photo prints together or cutting out the final work, each step in the process is played for keeps. That’s one thing that makes these photomontages so special and why you don’t see creations like these much anywhere else.
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