Rivkah Walton, MFA

For much of my life, I have used photography as a way of seeing and understanding the world. It has been a spiritual practice, a way of awareness, of “being here now” in every moment.

In the course of earning my MFA in Crafts at Tyler School of Art (1982), I was making images with analog film, printing the black and white photos in a chemical-infused darkroom. In the years since, I have pursued many different artistic media – including figurative and portrait sculpture.

In the summer of 2017, I began shooting in earnest again under the brief but encouraging instruction of photographer Bill Aron, with the initial objective of simply photographing anything that caught my eye – nature, architecture, faces. With pixels replacing film, I could be quite photographically promiscuous, leaving it until recently to discern themes and patterns.

Not surprisingly, those themes and patterns have turned out to reflect my long fascinations with the details of nature, with human gestures and interpersonal relationships, and most especially, with the plight of marginalized groups and their demands for justice.

My return to black and white images is also not surprising. As a child, I was often drawn to trees – not lush green ones of spring, but dormant, gnarly gray ones of winter. Similarly, when sculpting, I was interested in form, texture, and composition, and realized that I find color to be distracting and even confusing. To sculpt, one has to understand how light falls on a form; that is precisely what black and white photography reveals.

Much of my work is in the tradition of “Street Photography” – spontaneous photographs of daily life, largely in public places. In this realm, I am indebted to the strong formal elements of Paul Strand’s and Fan Ho’s compositions, the solitude reflected in David Heath’s revealing images, and the deeply humanistic portraits of Dorothea Lange, who said of the photographer, “Every image [s/he] sees, every photograph [s/he] takes, becomes in a sense a self-portrait.”

Photo: (c) Dove Nasir 2019. Used by Permission.