V. Elizabeth Turk, C. W. _ Summer_, 1992, silver gelatin print, Printed 2023, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
An Unfinished Exposure:
The Art and Afterlife of Christian Walker
By Andrew Alexander
Christian Walker, Performance Counts, 1987-1988, Silver gelatin print with ink and oil hinged to museum board,14 3/8 x 21 1/2 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
"It is the artists committed to the radical restructuring of subjectivity who are pioneering the visual imaging of future culture."
With these words, Christian Walker—a path-making Black gay photographer active in Boston and Atlanta from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s—encapsulated his mission to challenge and redefine societal perceptions through his art.
Walker was an artist of contradictions and anomalies, one who doesn’t fit easily into existing categories or art historical narratives: This elusiveness is likely part of the reason that his groundbreaking work isn’t better known. He trained at one of the most prestigious academic art institutions in the country, but he was also a peripatetic street photographer, an outsider who captured marginalized and disadvantaged communities who died homeless and in relative obscurity. He was a resolutely urban artist, but he was never associated with the traditional urban art centers of New York and Los Angeles. He was a documentarian whose images often speak with a raw, journalistic immediacy, but he was equally drawn to experimental techniques and painterly post-exposure manipulation. He never shied away from frank engagement with sexuality, yet he insisted on describing his own work as “anti-pornographic.” His work was politically charged, but it was also marked by deep introspection. His lens was as sharply focused on the bright outer world as it was on the shadowy interior of the human mind.
Christian Walker, Performance Counts, 1987-1988, Silver gelatin print with ink and oil hinged to museum board,17 1/8 x 21 7/16 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
Walker’s practice spanned genres and mediums, including thought-provoking critical writings, but it was the singular fearlessness of his visual approach that truly distinguished him. In examining his work, one can discern an unwavering commitment to challenging normative representations of race and sexuality, an effort to disrupt established aesthetic criteria, and a confrontation with cultural assumptions.
Born in 1953 in Springfield, Massachusetts, Walker moved to Boston in 1974, where he began taking photographs and contributing words and images to gay publications such as Fag Rag and Gay Community News. Walker attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. After graduating in 1984, he moved to Atlanta, where he continued his photography practice. In 1985, he published his photo book The Theater Project through Atlanta’s Nexus Press, and, in 1990, he co-curated the exhibition Against the Tide: Art in the Age of AIDS and Censorship with sociologist and historian Cindy Patton. During his time in Atlanta, Walker regularly wrote art criticism for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Atlanta-based ART PAPERS. In his writing, he often focused on how racialized bodies and identities are depicted in visual culture.
During his time in Atlanta, Walker’s artistic practice shifted toward alternative photographic processes involving multiple exposures, archival appropriation, and the integration of paint and nontraditional materials. Walker moved to Seattle in the late 1990s, where he seemingly found himself in dire straits. Little is known about his life and work during this time: He died at a Seattle halfway house in 2003 at the age of 50.
In the years after his death, his work has remained largely unrecognized. It’s likely that a great deal of late work has been irrevocably lost or destroyed. However, in fall 2023, the exhibition Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant the first comprehensive survey of his work opened at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibition was on view at Tufts University Art Galleries in Boston through April 2024 and is slated to open at Atlanta’s Contemporary Art Center in 2025.
Christian Walker, Miscegenation, 1985-1991, Silver gelatin print with raw pigments hinged to museum board,15 1/8 x 19 7/8 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
From the outset of his career, Walker recognized the power of art to challenge ideologies, particularly those related to race and identity. His early works, often untitled photographic portraits of Black, queer, or otherwise marginalized subjects, reflect efforts to explore the intersections of race and representation, questioning and resisting the ways in which such subjects were depicted in historical and contemporary visual culture. Early subjects have a deep and mysterious sense of interiority, often gazing out at the viewer, breaking the fourth wall. They are self-possessed, resisting easy dismissal, classification, or objectification.
Over time, his work evolved to incorporate more complex–and often controversial–themes of hybridity, miscegenation, and the politics of desire. One of the most notable techniques he developed in his portraiture was the use of double exposure, a method that allowed him to merge multiple images and perspectives into a single frame. This technique even more strongly emphasizes the idea of layered identities—especially as it relates to the Black body–and as it interacts with and resists the forces of objectification and oversimplification. In later portraits, double exposure creates an unsettling, fractured image. Subjects are often depicted in–or even obscured by–overlapping textures, abstracted forms, and chaotic visual rhythms that literalize Walker’s sense of the subject’s internal complexity. In Walker’s view, identity could not—and should not—be reduced to a single, static, surmisable surface image.
His Theater Project (1985) is a seminal photographic work that offers an intimate glimpse into the world of the Pilgrim Theater, an adult cinema in Boston's Combat Zone during the early 1980s. Published in 1985 by Atlanta’s Nexus Press, the book comprises a series of grainy, black-and-white photographs that capture the theater's patrons in moments of solitude or connection. Walker's images are characterized by their deliberate blurriness and high contrast: The darkness of the theater likely necessitated a slow shutter speed without a flash, creating images with a sense of ghostlike ephemerality. In many, we discern the theater’s former life, its baroquely wainscoted balustrades and grandly elegant balconies.
Christian Walker, The Theater Project, 1983-1984, Silver gelatin print, 8 11/16 x 13 5/16 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
He describes the theater as "a contemporary urban temple" where a diverse array of individuals converged in search of connection away from judgmental eyes, making it a singular refuge within the urban landscape. Despite the freedom it offered, Walker noted the sense of isolation within, referring to it as a place "where the pervasive loneliness of the outside world is crystallized, sharp-focused, made painful and jewel-like."
Walker’s work in The Theater Project recalls the Japanese tradition of ukiyo-e, the floating world. Originally a Buddhist term used to refer to the transient nature of life, the term “floating world” came to be used during Japan’s Edo period to refer to the transient, urban, pleasure-seeking lifestyle centered around entertainment districts in places like Kabuki theaters, brothels, Geisha tea houses, and nightlife quarters.
Much like the traditional ukiyo-e woodblock print artists—such as Katsushika Hokusai or Utagawa Hiroshige—Walker uses visual complexity and ambiguity to evoke the tension between public and private selves. In his work, the line between the personal and the social becomes blurred, much as the figures in ukiyo-e prints seemingly float between worlds.
The publication of The Theater Project was not without controversy. Boston Licensing Commissioner Joanne Prevost Anzalone used the book as evidence to temporarily shut down the Pilgrim Theater, citing it in her campaign against such establishments. In response, Walker defended his work, stating, "It's a very outrageous situation that a document, a piece of art, is used as a way of harassing men."
Christian Walker, The Theater Project, 1983-1984, Silver gelatin print, 9 x 13 1/4 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
Ironically, Walker described his work as "anti-pornographic." He insisted that he refused to sexualize the body, especially the Black body, in ways that erased its humanity. This rejection of pornography, in the sense of objectification and fetishization, is key to understanding the broader political and ethical stance behind his artistic choices. Despite the prejudiced response of the commissioner and her ilk, Walker actually sought to critique the ways in which mainstream culture reduced bodies to objects of shame or desire. In his work, Walker resists the commodification of the body as a site of spectacle or consumption, seeking instead to represent the full humanity, the depth and agency of his subjects. The Theater Project stands as a significant contribution to the documentation of queer spaces and experiences, "anti-pornographic" in that it’s a poignant exploration of a hidden subculture, capturing the complexities of desire and the search for human connection within the strange and haunting confines of a disregarded urban space.
Walker’s provocatively titled Miscegenation series (1985-1991) features portraits of interracial couples, often zeroing in on contrasted Black and white body parts. The term "miscegenation" has a charged history, used in the context of anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. Walker confronts the lingering impact of these mores, questioning societal norms about racial purity and integration. In the images, a dark-skinned arm lies gently against a pale back, or a white hand rests on the crook of a black arm. Through stark contrasts, the very nature of “black-and-white” photography, Walker emphasizes dualities. The photographs may seem contextless and without background, but the context is ineluctably the brutal history of the convergence of black and white in America. The simple, gentle touch of skin on skin can seem revolutionary, even shocking.
In his essay The Miscegenated Gaze from the late 80s, Walker likewise took on, through writing, the challenge of deconstructing the visual and cultural practices that maintain the racial status quo. His call for artists to "embrace and celebrate the concept of non-white subjectivity" serves as both a critique of racial exclusion and an invitation to rethink how art can represent—and participate in—social change. It’s a stance that places him in opposition to much of the aesthetic discourse of his own time and ours, which often insists that only non-white artists and critics are positioned to examine non-white subjects, that the use of Black subjects by white creatives is inherently problematic, disempowering, objectifying, and inequitable. His was not simply a call for inclusion; it was a call to redefine the parameters of artistic engagement, a push against the traditional confines of what is considered valuable, meaningful, and beautiful, what can and should be an appropriate subject for representation. His was a broad call to end Black invisibility and dissolution in our visual culture.
Christian Walker, Performance Counts, 1987-1988, Silver gelatin print with ink and oil hinged to museum board,14 1/2 x 21 5/8 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
While in Atlanta, Walker created his Performance Counts series (1987-1988), primarily consisting of sharply observed street scenes and interactions between Black and white subjects. In these prints, Walker experimented with painterly post-exposure techniques. The processes bring forth a luminous, almost surreal, quality in the otherwise documentary photographs, highlighting human interactions (and non-interactions). In one especially striking image, a well-dressed elderly white couple, smiling broadly at the camera, passes by an African American man slumped uncomfortably, possibly sleeping, seated on a drain pipe. Inexplicably, a horse’s head, possibly suggesting an out-of-frame police presence enforcing and ensuring the power dynamic of this momentary non-event, peers out over the scene from the left side of the image.
The series’ title Performance Counts is also the catchphrase of Mack trucks, which is often seen at street level on the vehicles’ insignia. It serves here as an ironic reminder of the performative nature of public identity. The surface performativity of a single role often conceals complex, nuanced interior realities, or even renders individuals invisible within the urban landscape. The phrase also comments on systems that quantify and judge people, whether in institutional settings or cultural hierarchies that persist in everyday life. The unconventional layer of painterly manipulation similarly serves as a physical reminder that an image is, in the end, a surface-level representation of a complex reality.
Walker’s series Another Country (1990) is another direct reflection of his unwavering commitment to exploring the intersections of race, identity, and representation. The title is an allusion to James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country, a work that delves into themes of sexuality, race, and societal alienation. Walker’s series likewise challenges conventional notions of belonging, identity, and social construction. His work here captures intimate and sometimes politically charged images of Black men, often confronting societal norms and expectations. He blends references to historical and contemporary moments of racial struggle–slave auctions or racially-charged court trials–with an emphasis on the alienation experienced by black individuals in a society that constantly defines them through exclusion, commodification, imprisonment, and control.
Christian Walker, Another Country, 1990, Silver gelatin print with ink and oil hinged to museum boardI, 20 x 24 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
The series is notable for its powerful use of chiaroscuro lighting, which emphasizes the subjects' bodies and faces while also creating a sense of mystery and emotional depth. The images often blur the lines between representation and abstraction. Through his lens, Another Country becomes a space for envisioning new ways of being, for exploring the complexities of race and identity through a prism of fluidity rather than fixed categories.
His series Mule Tales (1990-1995) faced significant backlash upon its release, with many critics accusing Walker of being too explicit or too controversial in his portrayal of race and sexuality. “White people thought my work had reached a point where they thought I was trying to make them feel guilty,” Walker said. “And black people felt I was bringing up some notions that should no longer exist in the culture.”
The works in Mule Tales directly confront issues of labor, exploitation, and racial subjugation, using the metaphor of the mule—an animal historically associated with hard labor, low value, and endurance—as a symbol of the Black body’s role in American society. The work uses found archival images from such sources as pulp book covers or magazine advertising to juxtapose often stereotypical sexualized or dehumanized images of black subjects, alongside text recounting deplorably racist jokes and the like. Critics argued that Walker’s work was too raw and that it pushed boundaries of taste and decency.
The work in Mule Tales is undeniably discomforting and disturbing, but critics may have misunderstood Walker’s artistic intent. His background outside mainstream art centers, his nontraditional blending of pop references, surrealism, and folk culture may have evoked negative reactions both for its disturbing themes and for its sharp departure from expectations and easy categorization. In contemplating the work today, it’s worth considering whether it was simply ahead of its time.
Christian Walker, Mule Tales, 1990-1995,Silver gelatin print with varnish overlay and text hinged to museum board, 15 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art
On that note, Walker’s life, work, and reputation strikingly parallel those of the writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), who is often now said to have been ahead of her time. The critical backlash Walker faced is not unlike the critical reception of her work, which was attacked by both Black and white critics, progressive and conservative voices alike, during her lifetime. Like Walker, Hurston forged a singular path, working across genres: She created fiction and non-fiction, novels, short stories, plays, anthropology, reportage, memoir, and folklore. Hurston similarly refused to conform to expectations. She did not align with progressive orthodoxy, earning scorn from many of her contemporaries. Her interest in Black folklife was often seen as provincial and retrograde, perpetuating stereotypes of Black people. Yet throughout her life, she insisted on depicting African American life in all its complexity and contradictions. Similarly, Walker’s unflinching approach to race, identity, and sexuality has often led to criticism from multiple quarters, reflecting the broader resistance to outsider work that challenges the status quo.
Interestingly, and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Hurston was also drawn to mules as symbolism, particularly their association with resilience, burden, and perseverance. Their low status made them a poignant metaphor for marginalized voices, for unacknowledged struggle. In her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Hurston explicitly connects the image of the mule to the struggles of Black people.
All but forgotten after her death, her books out of print, Hurston’s career was revived in the late 20th-century after a 1975 essay by Alice Walker in Ms. magazine. It’s a resuscitation—the survival of an artist into a different and more sympathetic future--that Christian Walker likely witnessed firsthand with great interest and deep understanding.
Despite his provocative and insightful contributions to the art world, Walker’s work and writing remain relatively obscure. His refusal to conform to mainstream expectations, particularly his commitment to subverting racial and sexual norms, has led to a lack of recognition, much as Hurston’s work went underappreciated during her lifetime. Yet, like Hurston, Walker’s work holds the potential to become more fully appreciated as it gains greater visibility and as audiences begin to recognize the radical nature of his aesthetic and intellectual contributions.
When it comes to historical narratives, what has been left out is often more significant than what’s been included. Christian Walker’s critical writings, innovative techniques, and unflinching engagement with themes of race, sexuality, and identity make him a singular voice in American art. His work positioned him as a pioneer in mapping a hereafter that he hoped would embrace diversity and nuance. The sheer courage and tenacity of his aesthetic vision suggest his sights were set on a time beyond his own. As with Zora Neale Hurston, his recognition may come as his work is understood in all its radical complexity.
Andrew Alexander is an Atlanta-based writer whose work has been featured in publications such as Art Papers, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Creative Loafing, Bomb, and ArtsATL. He covers visual art, classical music, opera, theater, and dance.
Andrew Alexander