Shawn Walker’s layered, psychedelic vision of Harlem’s streets

For photographer Shawn Walker, life is not black and white but a symphony of textures and tones, layered like the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of his hometown. Born in Harlem in 1940, Walker got his start accompanying his uncle, Herbert Hoover, a bar photographer who became one of the first in the neighbourhood to get a Polaroid. By the late ​’50s, he was hanging out in storied jazz clubs like Minton’s Playhouse and Birdland, while practicing his own instrument: the camera. 

Watching his uncle’s thriving side hustle, Walker intuitively understood he could make photographs without having to rely on it as his livelihood. He joined a local photography group that merged with another in 1963 to become Kamoinge, today the oldest nonprofit photography collective in the world. Walker, the youngest founding member, was joined by luminaries including Roy DeCarava, Adger Cowans, Anthony Barboza, and later Ming Smith and Frank Stewart. 

It was here, in Kamoinge members’ homes during their spirited Sunday sessions, that Walker learned photography was not just a trade, it was an art. There were no rules, other than he could write his own, and so he did, devoting a lifetime to elevating photography to the realm of fine art​.In 2019, Walker became the first Black photographer to have his archive acquired by the Library of Congress, his collection of over 100,000 images housed alongside luminaries including Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou – all of whom he has photographed during his storied seven-decade career. 

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But Walker refuses to rest on the laurels of his success, preferring to blaze his own path as a visionary iconoclast. In recent months, his 1970s photograph of a masked man blowing bubbles in Central Park was on view in Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art, taking his rightful place alongside contemporaries like Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, and Lee Friedlander. ​“As a Black artist, what we’re supposed to do is move Black art to another level. We’re not here just to repeat [ourselves or someone else],” Walker says. 

Now in his 86^th year, Walker introduces his very first monograph, From BeBop to Illusion (Kurt Boone Books), a hypnotic chronicle of Harlem through the decades. Drawing inspiration from DeCarava, M.C. Escher, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker takes to the streets of his hometown, turning the camera away from passersby, choosing to go through the looking glass instead. He takes aim at vast expanses of glass windows soaring up to the sky, these delectable jewel boxes of luxury commerce dazzling the eye. 

Everywhere it is mannequins dressed within an inch of their lives, done up in finery as they loom above the pavement, looking down on pedestrians shuttling about their lives. Walker situates them in the landscape of illusion, fashion, and fantasy. But as the rhythm picks up, it slides into a nightmare: skulls appear, bulging eyes and rotting teeth. The end of the earth is upon us; soon we will go the way of the dinosaur whose monstrous jaws are the unironic centrepiece of a Christmas window display. 

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The ever-present spectre of annihilation, be it by the forces of nature or the hand of the state, reveals itself in the silence between notes, where the theme of jazz becomes a departure point for something far more disconcerting. ​“Are you familiar with the neutron bomb?” Walker asks of the now-banned thermonuclear weapons program developed by the United States in the 1950s and ​’60s, designed for maximum death while leaving the environment fully intact. 

“It struck me that somebody decided to make a bomb that killed people but did not destroy infrastructure; that just blew me away,” Walker continues. It brought back childhood memories of The World, the Flesh and the Devil, the 1959 film starring Harry Belafonte as a post-apocalyptic survivor who travels to New York in search of others. In those haunting scenes of emptiness populated only by inanimate mannequins, Walker recognised the presence of parallel universes that reveal themselves through the cracks of light where this work was born.

“I don’t feel I am supposed to stand still in my career,” Walker says. ​“I was put here for a purpose.” 

From BeBop to Illusion by Shawn Walker is published by Kurt Boone Books.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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