Denzel Walkes

Portfolio

Photography

Two sequences, kept apart because they are made differently rather than because they look different. Everything in Film came off a roll and through a lab scanner; everything in Digital came off a sensor. Each is shown at its own proportions — nothing on this page is cropped to match anything else on it.

Film

35mm colour and black-and-white negative, scanned at the lab. Sequenced rather than dated: a scan records when the roll was developed, which is not when the picture was taken.

  • A long, empty office corridor under recessed fluorescent panels, the pale walls and dark doorframes converging on a closed wooden door and a small red exit sign at the far end.
  • An ornate Spanish Colonial bell tower and tiled dome lit orange by low sun, above a long arcade hung with banners. People cross the open plaza in front of it in silhouette.
  • A passenger jet on final approach, low over a two-storey stucco building whose balconies are curtained in climbing vine. Palms and overhead power lines cross a hazy blue sky.
  • Inside a wooden lath conservatory, its arched slatted roof filling the upper half of the frame. A crowd moves between staged banks of red and white poinsettias; a man in a dark jacket stands still, looking past the camera.
  • Someone submerged just under the surface of a swimming pool, seen from the edge. A red garment and a pale hand read clearly through the water; the rest of the figure breaks apart in the refraction and the surface glare.
  • A black-and-white portrait of a man in a light cap, wire-rimmed glasses and a black t-shirt, head lowered and turned in profile as he works at something out of frame. Brushed steel panelling behind him.
  • A dim residential corridor in warm tungsten light, wall sconces repeating down both sides and a bright window at the far end. The near half of the frame falls away into shadow.
  • A black-and-white view down into a wooded canyon crossed by a concrete road bridge on tall piers. Several people are scattered along the footpath beneath it, and a stone stair with a balustrade climbs out of frame at the right.
  • An airliner passing low over the drum-shaped facade of the San Diego Air and Space Museum, whose signage and exhibition banner are legible. A jet fighter and a dark aircraft are mounted either side of the entrance; two people watch from the foreground.

Digital

Oldest first, which these can be: a digital frame carries the moment its shutter opened, so the order is the order they happened in.

  • Stacked tiers of hotel balconies at night, receding diagonally across the frame. Warm lamplight picks out each doorway against the deep blue of the unlit concrete.
    2022 · Sony a6400
  • A tall white cross monument floodlit from below against a black night sky, its two crossbars throwing hard shadows down the shaft. Nothing else in the frame is lit.
    2022 · Sony A7R V
  • A very low-key portrait: a face emerging from near-total black, lit only enough to describe the nose, mouth and jaw. Two small highlights catch in the lenses of round glasses.
    2024 · Sony A7R V
  • A black-and-white frame of a cyclist carrying speed through the banking of a velodrome, blurred to a smear of dark shapes by a long exposure. The painted sprinters’ lines curve cleanly through the grey concrete around him.
    2024 · Sony A7R V
  • The same velodrome at dusk, empty: floodlights burning over a treeline against an orange and deep-blue sky, the banked track sweeping around a lit green infield.
    2024 · Sony A7R V
  • Two tall palms leaning apart in front of a bay, the long curve of a bridge dissolving into fog behind them and moored sailboats along the waterline. A traffic cone and a painted arrow sit on the asphalt in the foreground.
    2024 · iPhone 13 Pro Max

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