Dr. Les Walkling (b. 1953)

I am an artist, educator and digital imaging consultant.

Before turning to fine art photography in 1975 I had been studying science and philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Largely self taught as a photographer, I had the privilege in 1981 and 1982 of living in the USA supported by Australia Council Arts grants, studying and working with the artists Emmet Gowin and Frederick Sommer, who were my most defining and critical intellectual influences at that time.

I have exhibited widely, including the retrospective one-person show ‘So to Live as to Dream’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1990. My work is also represented in many public collections including The Center for Creative Photography, Arizona, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and The National Gallery of Victoria.

I presented my first photography workshop in 1977 and have conducted regular digital photography courses since 1993 through the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), and training seminars and professional development programs for the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP), the Australian Commercial and Media Photographers (ACMP), and many of our cultural institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia, and the Australian War Memorial.

My first university appointment was in 1983 as a lecturer in drawing, and subsequently in fine art photography and media arts history and theory. I am the former Program Director of Media Arts at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia (1993 – 2005), and a Senior Research Fellow and Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant recipient in the School of Art (2006-2010). I supervised over fifty MA and PhD research candidates to successful and timely completions. In 2011 I took early retirement from RMIT in order to remove all administrative constraints from my research and practice.

My current fine art research investigates the formation of identity, material thinking, anti-colonialism, preoccupations of beauty, and genealogies of digital light theory and practice. My post doctoral research has included the independent management of luminance and chromaticity in colour managed digital capture, editing and fine art printing workflows. My consulting services include the design, evaluation and implementation of digitisation, preservation, archiving and colour managed workflows, production standards, staff training and quantitative and qualitative digital systems analysis.

Professionally I split my time each year between ten related and overlapping activities;  researching, writing, creating, thinking, exhibiting, consulting, traveling, supervising, lecturing and teaching. Some of this work is seasonal, in the sense that in the five months from November to March I spend much of my time researching and writing, while most of my teaching, consulting and exhibiting takes place in the seven months from March to October.

Since 2000 my creative output has focused mainly on collaborative projects, including four bodies of work with Polexini Papapetrou since 2005, and assisting Bill Henson since 2008 with his transition from analogue to digital editing and printing. In 2010 The Pilbara Project under the auspices of FORM (Western Australia) included the year long collaboration with fellow photographers Christian Fletcher, Tony Hewitt and Peter Eastway, and the curator William Fox (Nevada Museum of Art).

In 2010 I was appointed the digital imaging consultant on the Atlas of Living Australia. The project is an initiative to improve access to essential information on Australia’s biodiversity, and is a partnership between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian natural history collections community and the Australian Government.

Since 2011 my son Andrey has been working beside me as an exhibiting artist, research assistant, fellow consultant, and teacher in my educational programs.