“Since I started taking images, there’s always been this searching of – or seeking to understand – my environment,” says photographer Kendal Walker. Though now based mostly in London, Walker grew up in Utah, and the distinct environment of that mountainous, small city panorama continues to permeate her work. Recurring photographs of lone figures in empty landscapes foster a pervading feeling of solitude. The textures of the atmosphere are sometimes abrasive or hostile – snow, asphalt, rubble, chainlink fence. “[Growing up], I had a lot of time and physical space to myself. There was a lot of quiet and many moments alone. There’s peace and beauty to that, but also a restlessness or loneliness that I often swung between.”
Curated by the artist’s sister, her newest photograph ebook, Tracks, consists of images taken from the final eight years of her archive, however its origins might date again to an earlier time. “There’s not a distinct starting point for Tracks, it started much before I was conscious of what I was actually making,” she says. Like reminiscence, it’s not chronological. “I am very interested in taking disparate images as fragments of experience, and piecing them together to evoke a feeling; an attempt to reflect moments of life – often messy and emotionally loaded,” she says. Tracks will not be linear however it’s diaristic; an erratic, fragmented autobiography.
From this blizzard of photographs, which means and rhythm emerge. “Photographing between Utah, New York, and London, patterns of movement, change, connection and isolation started to reveal themselves within the contrasting environments I’d been living between,” she tells AnOther. “In hindsight, the images are very reflective of what I was feeling and experiencing at the time. I’ve spoken to many photographers about this idea that images take time to understand, and having an archive and perspective really only becomes clear with distance. Images definitely gain value over time. They turn from instant moments to artifacts.”
For Walker, images is a solution to not simply file the world however to explicate it. “It’s definitely an outlet to parse through my emotions as much as it is to document what is around me. I’m not a photographer who attempts to separate the two, so every image I take is a reflection of my perspective as much as it is of the thing itself,” she says. “Photography has always given me a deep sense of purpose.”
Revisiting photographs from the previous reveals new meanings within the photos. Revisiting the locations of our youth additionally offers us the chance to reevaluate our understanding of these websites – our lieux de mémoire. “One of the images is of a teenager in Heber drifting in the snow in the rodeo parking lot. This is something I used to do as a teenager, so for my dissertation I went back to Utah to study and photograph teenagers and their relationship to their cars as private space and tools for independence. In the image they’re going around and around, which is something I observe a lot in the pattern of life and where I’m from,” she says of a specific {photograph} depicting looping tyre marks within the snowy floor of the automotive park. “From driving the same road to the same places every day, to the cycle of tradition and living that repeats itself generationally.”
Anyone who’s grown up feeling stifled in a small city earlier than escaping to the massive metropolis is prone to perceive a sophisticated and ambivalent relationship to house. Tracing the looping paths she has made as she circles the locations that make life legible to her, Tracks evokes a strong sense of attachment and estrangement with childhood locations and scenes of our youth. “There’s a dizzying, disorienting feeling that comes with that beauty of circling over and over again,” Walker says.
Tracks is printed by Innen and is out on 13 June 2026. The accompanying exhibition takes place at Manor Place, London, SE17 3BD from 13–24 June 2026.
