This is the second of my two-part interview with Melanie Walker. Melanie teaches in the CU Boulder Media Arts department. When she joined the faculty in 1992 she was known for her use of alternative photographic processes and mixed media, to which she has added large-scale photographic installations, public art, and digital media. This part centers on her Colorado imagemaking and concludes with a discussion of two collaborations: one that incorporates images made by her late-father, Todd Walker, and a second with her partner, the artist/sculptor George Peters. She and George have completed numerous public art commissions in a number of national and international locations, including Colorado, Arizona, London, Japan, Florida, Alaska, and California.

RJ: We ended Part One discussing your father’s work and influence on your own artmaking. Who else has influenced your work?

MW: Robert Fichter and his sensibilities—pushing the envelope with historical processes and a lot of experimentation. Along with a healthy dose of visual satire. Fichter had been working in LA where he taught at UCLA with Robert Heinecken. At that time, in the seventies, there was groundbreaking experimentation going in Southern California. Fichter left LA and went to Florida to start the program at Tallahassee. I was part of the first graduating class going through the program.

Along with classmates Victor Schrager and Ben Davis, we started a group called the Big Bend Photo Club that was very much influenced by Fluxus. We were provocateurs. The archive is housed at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.

With my installation work and optical toys, the pre-history of photography is a major influence—Daguerre’s diorama and the cyclorama in particular. Annette Messenger has been an inspiration and Christian Boltanski as well. John Wood who was a colleague at Alfred University was a big influence. Betty Hahn was a role model. Jim Pomeroy and Paul DeMarinis were influential with performance and sound. In San Francisco I lived next door to New Langton Arts in San Francisco when founder David Wilson brought work from the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA. I spent a lot of time talking with him when he was installing that show.

“Housedreams,” from the *Househeads* series.

RJ: Talking of distressing materials, hand-setting, multiples, etc., have you always emphasized non-silver coursework at CU Boulder?

MW: I’ve been teaching historical processes since I began teaching in 1975 and brought this to the program at Boulder in 1992. Students have always been receptive to hand made prints and other ways of making images. The strength of our faculty pretty much across the board is the interdisciplinary approach to materiality, whatever the medium is. My practice fits into that approach. Luis Valdavino who teaches video has an extensive history with historical processes, and Alex [Sweetman] certainly encourages that with books and his passion for history. I would also say that our Special Collections is really instrumental in Boulder. It's one of the best photo book collections in the country, thanks to Alex.

We still have beautiful darkrooms. I think digital in a way limits spontaneity even though it's so accessible. People get locked into the camera-formed image when there are so many ways of working with the medium. Sometimes I like to think about the history of photography as being the history of blindness. Because it's that moment when you can't see through the camera that's being recorded.

RJ: That’s a fascinating thought. Do you consider yourself a sight impaired photographer, as an identity?

MW: I've done projects about my own blindness, like making stereo viewing cards that try to give people a sense of what it's like to experience other ways of seeing, like when your eyes don't work together. So, not specifically about the history of blindness—it's more a kind of philosophical underpinning that I think about all the time. I haven't really tried to promote the idea that I’m sight impaired just because there are so many other people who are much more disadvantaged than I am but it is challenging to see double every waking moment. I do like calling it a “diffability.” We all have a diffability in a certain way. I think because of my challenges with my vision, my work has always been multisensory. Photography for me is all immersive.

I think photography has always been something that surrounds, rather than something that's singular in front of you. I guess I should talk a little bit about when I was at Alfred, because at one point I was given the gallery to do whatever I wanted. I set up an extensive installation in the darkened gallery and when viewers walked in a home security system would trigger lights, sound and other devices; slide shows and soundtracks would start, and lights would come on. There were optical toys with concealed switches operating photo sculptures like the thaumatrope. Many of my 20 x 24 inch Polaroids were also included in the exhibition as well.

RJ: When did you start making the 20 x 24 Polaroids?

MW: In 1982, through Friends of Photography and Polaroid, I was invited along with five other California photographers to use the big camera in Carmel, CA. We were each given sixty sheets of material. I went into a panic with the idea of using color film because all of the color work that I’d done up to that point had been additive color through gum printing. Eventually I figure a way to bridge my idea of additive color that meshed with the gum prints.

This opportunity was also the starting point for my Househead work. It was shortly after I'd spent time in the Hopi lands with Victor Masayesva, who is a Hopi artist, videographer, and photographer who studied with my father. He and my father were really close. Victor had allowed my father to see some of the practices for the Home Dance. When I'd visited the Hopilands I heard stories about the Home Dance and about the Kachinas.

After I received the Polaroid invitation, the Househeads came to me in a dream. One of them watched over me while I was healing. I kind of embraced it as a spirit guide. The Househead work has been an ongoing body of work. For me, shelter is universal for all living things, whether it be a seed or a person, or an animal. Everything seeks shelter for protection, for nurturing. We're all connected. We're all family. The Househead work operates as a place for connectedness during these troubling times with environmental collapse, issues surrounding migrations due to war, famine … a common ground during these divisive times.

RJ More recently you’ve worked on public art projects with your partner, George Peters.

MW I started working with George in 1996. We have done about 100 public art projects together over the last twenty-five-plus years through our Airworks Studio. All of the work is collaborative and site specific. We also make kites together and have been invited to participate in international kite festivals all over the world.

1996 was the year my mother passed and then in '98, my father passed, Recently I've been working with some of his destroyed advertising negatives that begin to function as a critique of the fictional “American Dream”. Growing up with photography in the way that I did, I was aware at an early age of the concept of constructed reality associated with pictures. Being a part of pretend families in some of the Chevy ads was impactful and part of the motivation behind the Househead work. Photography has been a playground for me.

I have been trying to weave all of these different bodies of work together due to the connections I see between environmental anxiety, the Househeads and overpopulation, a critique of the American Dream and capitalism, which is very much related to these negatives that are by time, heat, and moisture.

RJ: Do you see that as a collaboration?

MW: Absolutely. I’ve referred to the work as a posthumous collaboration. When I show the work, I always put two dates on it; the date I printed the compromised negative as well as circa 1950 along with both of our names.

Melanie Walker with a prototype artwork using a destroyed advertising image made by her father. Photograph by Rupert Jenkins, 2021.

RJ: I think it's fascinating that you're working with his negs.

MW: The decay is so incredibly beautiful. When the light skims the surface and reveals the aberrations it’s stunning.

RJ: And the final product is a print?

MW: A print of one sort of another. The work has been very experimental inspired by the innovation that I witnessed through my father’s working process. Some of the work has been printed using processes that he taught me as well as some of my own innovations. I see the work as a way to continue a posthumous conversation with my father as well as a way to address notions of impermanence and fragility in photography.

END

All images by Melanie Walker unless noted.

This interview is edited from two separate recordings made on November 22, 2016 and August 21, 2021. It was edited for clarity and length with Melanie Walker in May 2022.

The Colorado Photo History blog is the online presence for “Outside Influence,” a book project by Rupert Jenkins. As always, please leave a comment or a suggestion for future posts, and visit #Colorado Photo History on Instagram and Facebook.

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