Before delving into the social issues that Christian Walker wrestled with in his relatively short but vibrant career (spanning the mid 1970s through the mid 1990s) his quieter formal achievements should be considered. The formal and social buttress each other in his work, but it is Walker’s symbolic cropping; his use of gestural and painterly interventions as in his “Miscegenation” series (1985–1988) or “Performance Counts” series (1987-88), or textual overlays and sidebars, as in Junkies Don’t Care About Bleach (1989) or the “Mule Tales” series (1990–95) that represent a truly impressive contribution to the discipline of photography. In “The Theater Project” (1983–84) Walker nimbly positions rarefied patches of light floating within a thick blanket of encompassing velvety darkness—abstract blurs which constitute the murky presences of patrons going about their business in the Pilgrim Theater, a “porno palace” in Boston’s Combat Zone neighborhood. Walker’s technical choices are capable of weaving a fictional or magical testimony into that which has been chemically imprinted. The control of a blurry outline of a ghostly presence—or bleaching out the silhouettes of two figures commingling or masturbating in the Pilgrim Theater’s bathroom stalls, so that they achieve a blinding and luminous presence—is so deft and controlled that it speaks to a masterful agency and intentionality in this most mimetic of art forms.
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