Melanie & Todd Walker, Good Grief, The Photograph Reimagined

Nov. 3rd – 25th, 2026
Opening Reception: Second Friday, November 13th, 5 – 7:30 pm during the Springfield Art Walk
Artist Talk: November 15th at 2:30 pm at the Emerald Art Center (use side entrance on 5th St.)

Emerald Art Center
500 Main St.
Springfield, OR 97477
11 am – 4 pm Tues. – Sat.
Free and open to the public

Good Grief brings together the innovative work of my father, photographic artist, Todd Walker, and my posthumous collaboration shaped by the imperfect negatives he left behind.

The work presented in this exhibition is a sampling of some of his vast body of experimental digital work which he started in 1981, teaching himself machine language, way before Photoshop. Drawing on his painterly background where he taught himself color theory cleaning paint buckets at RKO Studios during his teens, he worked with his black and while negatives to create his own unique approach to color.

The works on silk are a part of a posthumous collaboration after finding damaged negatives from his early commercial work. Made around the time I was born, these compromised negatives carry traces of both photographic experimentation and personal history. Working with them now, I treat their damage and irregularities not as flaws to correct, but as openings—places where my father’s images meet my own hand and perspective. The resulting work holds two moments in relation: his act of making the photographs and my return to them decades later. I am interested in the physicality and material qualities of the disrupted surfaces and how they interact with the images recorded so long ago.

“The title Good Grief speaks to the tenderness and complexity of that return: the joy of discovering new possibilities in his work, alongside the ache of making something together after his death. The exhibition is a celebration of his inventive spirit and of the unexpected forms collaboration can take across time.”

Melanie Walker is a third-generation photographic artist whose expertise is in the area of alternative photographic processes, immersive photographic installations and public art. She has received a number of awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, Polaroid Materials Grants and the Aaron Siskind Award and is a third time PhotoLucida Critical Mass top 50 finalist. Her work is housed in numerous collections including the CCP Tucson, LACMA, and the Musee National d’art in Luxembourg. She recently stepped away from teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she taught historic photographic process and alternative ideas for presenting photographs throughout her teaching career of 48 years. She uses her work as a vehicle to understand the world.

Todd Walker (1917–1998) was a self-taught pioneer in photography. Born in Salt Lake City and raised in Los Angeles, he built a successful career as a commercial photographer in the 1940s before leaving it to pursue his artistic interests. Beginning in the 1960s, Walker explored alternative photographic processes—techniques that do not rely on silver gelatin—to develop a distinctive visual language. Dissatisfied with the formal possibilities of conventional photography, he gravitated toward processes such as the Sabatier effect, sometimes called solarization, which emphasizes the edges and lines of forms. He described this quality as “the line drawn by light.” Color also became a defining element of his work. In 1981, Walker began using digital processing to extend his photographic practice. He taught himself computer programming to create the tools he needed, carrying his experimentation into the final decades of his career.

melaniewalkerartist.com