Christian Walker

Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant surveys the work of artist, critic, and curator Christian Walker (1953–2003). Walker was a path-making photographer who made compelling and experimental work about queer sexuality, race, and their intersections from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. In the mid-1980s, his artistic practice shifted from documentary photography and portraiture to alternative photographic processes involving multiple exposures, archival appropriation, and the integration of paint and nontraditional materials.

Walker was primarily active in Boston and Atlanta, and his artworks, criticism, and exhibition-making addressed a myriad subjects, including queer public sex, interracial intimacy, HIV/AIDS, censorship, drug use, and Blackness and whiteness in public and private image cultures.

This exhibition is the first and most comprehensive account of Walker’s artistic and cultural production to date, yet it contains gaps and inconsistencies. Walker’s work is not confined to a single archive or collection, no photographic negatives have been found, and existing prints have sometimes been precariously housed, on the verge of being lost. 

Though Walker received significant critical and curatorial attention during his lifetime, his work has largely gone unrecognized since his death. Foregrounding archival materials, this exhibition chronologically contextualizes Walker within his artistic and activist communities; in doing so, it situates his photographs, critical writings, and curatorial projects as vital contributions to the histories of art and photography. Reconstructed from oral history interviews with friends, lovers, and artistic collaborators, this curatorial narrative is inseparable from a biographical project, generating connections and tracing throughlines across Walker’s life and work.

This exhibition has been organized by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City and is presented at Atlanta Contemporary under the curatorial guidance of independent curators Jackson Davidow and Noam Parness.