Maxine Walker


Maxine Walker is a British-Jamaican photographer and critic. Based in Handsworth and active between 1985 and 1997, Walker has been described by Rianna Jade Parker as "a force within the Black British Art movement". Her photographs emphasise the fictive nature of documentary convention, and "raise questions about the nature of identity, challenging racial stereotypes".

Life

Maxine Walker was born in 1962 in Birmingham, England.
Walker's 1987 series Auntie Lindie's House challenged the unmediated nature of documentary photography, replicating photographic conventions within a fictional context. Black Beauty, a 1980s series, and Untitled, a series for the 1995 Self Evident exhibition, both consisted of self-portraits. Untitled contained a sequence of ten closely-cropped black and white photographs, in which Walker appeared to peel away successive layers of her surface skin.
Walker has written various reviews and texts for art magazines and exhibition-related publication. After Polareyes, a 1987 exhibition of black women photographers at the Camden Arts Centre, she co-edited and contributed to a short-lived journal of the same name. In 1999 she published a short artist's book in the series published by Autograph.

Works

Exhibitions

*