Shawn W. Walker American, b. 1940

American photographer Shawn Walker (b. 1940) is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker who was a founding member of the influential Black photographers’ collective, the Kamoinge Workshop. Walker began documenting life on his block, 117^th Street, and the surrounding Harlem neighborhood in 1960 and went on to have a successful career as a photojournalist and street photographer.

Born in Harlem, Walker was first introduced to photography at nine years old by his uncle, himself an avid photographer. He majored in photography from Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954 and earned a B.A. in photography from Empire State College in 1980. His work in the early ‘60s led to his Drug series, which examined Harlem’s drug problems and was featured in an Essence Magazine exposé in 1970. In ’63 Walker as hired by the Harlem Daily, a community newspaper, as a photographer, and was also invited to join the beginnings of the Kamoinge Workshop.

A New York-based collective of Black photographers, Kamoinge, translating to “group effort” from the Gikuyu language of the Kikuyu people in Kenya, was started by Walker’s contemporaries Louis Draper and Ray Francis and grew to include Black photographers such as Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Danny Dawson, Al Fennar, Herman Howard, Earl James, Jimmy Mannas, Herbert Randall, Herb Robinson, Beuford Smith, Ming Smith, Larry Stewart, and Calvin Wilson. The motivation of the Workshop was to avoid prevalent racial stereotypes in contemporary media and the typical violent coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, emphasizing instead the positivity and warmth of Black American communities and individuals, in alignment with the wider acceptance of photography as an artistic medium.

In 1965 Walker joined the Third World Newsreel as a founding member and travelled internationally to places such as Cuba and Guyana. Walker developed an extensive teaching career, working at Teacher’s College, CW Post, CUNY York College, CUNY Queensborough Community College, the International Center pf Photography, Pratt University, CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College, and CUNY City College. In 2012 he joined the United Federation of Teachers.

Walker has had exhibitions at numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian Institute, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg Center, Vassar College, the International Center of Photography, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Musuem, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work is held in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg Center, the New York Public Library, the National Gallery, and the Museum of Natural History, among others. He additionally has numerous publications and is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts grant. In 2020, Walker became the first African American photographer to have a collection of work acquired by the Library of Congress. He lives and works in Harlem, New York.