Robert Walker
in the Gaspésie National Park
EXHIBIT
Times Square Gothic
Chute Sainte-Anne hiking trail, mont Albert sector | Gaspésie National Park
Robert Walker, Montreal, Québec | robertwalkerphoto.com
Born in Montreal, Robert Walker graduated from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in 1969.
In Montreal as well he studied painting. He also participated in photography workshops there with Lee Friedlander, and with Gary Winogrand in New York, where he lived for 10 years and published his book New York Inside Out with an introduction by William S. Burroughs.
His work has been included in several major exhibitions concerning color photography: Color as Form: A History of Color Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; Color in the Street, at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; City Lights – Colour Photographs, at Goldsmiths Gallery, University of London; and New American Photographs, at Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. A major solo exhibition of his work, Color is Power, was shown at the Musée de la photographie à Charleroi, in Belgium; at Fotografie Forum International, Frankfurt, Germany; at the Museum of Art, Łodz, Poland; at the Jan Cunan Museum, Oss, Holland; at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; and at the Biennale internationale de l’image de Nancy, France.
In 2011 he was invited by the Positive View Foundation to participate in the project Real Venice, exhibited in conjunction with the 54th Venice Biennale. In 2012 he was included in the exhibition Cartier-Bresson A Question of Colour at Somerset House, London.
EXHIBIT AT RENCONTRES
Times Square Gothic
“For the past 35 years, photographing Times Square has been one of my obsessions. It is not that I am interested in documenting an exotic tourist destination, but, rather, using it as a metaphor to illustrate the implications of a society overrun by conspicuous consumption and celebrity worship.
“Over the decades I have witnessed how Times Square has been transformed. The idiosyncratic small businesses, along with the bevy of street characters such as religious evangelists, pimps and hustlers, have all been ousted in favor of corporate giant enterprises with their anonymous towers of aluminum and glass. The human element has been diminished in favor a one-dimensional, mind-numbing, visual cacophony of blaring advertising and sanitized streets.
“It encourages one to ask the question whether these symptoms signal a new relationship man is developing with his environment – a passionate disengagement from the ‘real world’ in favor of an antiseptic ‘virtual world.’
“This exhibition may offer an attempt to answer that question in part by placing these urban images in a totally unique context, Gaspésie National Park, the artificial and the natural existing together in stark opposition.”
Robert Walker