There was a time when photography was damned hard work: checking light meters and adjusting camera apertures, twirling focus rings. Whether carefully planned or serendipitously snapped, the photographer could never be absolutely certain if the moment the shutter was squeezed was a good one, until after a lengthy darkroom session with pungent chemicals, negative strips, bulky enlargers, and various photo papers — everything bathed in the flat glow of red safety lights.
Shawn Walker was born into this era, in Harlem, in 1940, and by his early twenties had joined the Kamoinge Workshop, a then recently formed (and still active) collective of Black photographers who wanted to raise awareness of the Black experience in America and abroad through their imagery. Walker soon became adept at decisively combining compelling narratives with vibrant, abstractly buttressed compositions. Street Scene (1965) captures a young girl in a white dress framed between slightly blurred fence railings in the foreground and the side of a whitewashed truck studded with rivets and edged with rust in the background. The little girl stares out of the frame, and whatever she sees there balances her intense expression on an edge between apprehension and surprise.
