Atlanta, Georgia | Mentor: Doug DuBois
Walker Bankson (b. 1998) is an artist, woodworker, and organizer based in Atlanta, GA. Drawing on his experience working as a union organizer in the south, his work centers collaboration with underrepresented communities over long periods of time to document how history is performed and fictionalized in contested spaces in the American South. He teaches within the communities he works as a means to empower the people he photographs and works collaboratively with them to transgress historical and visual tradition.
“Through a period in my life when many things were changing, my mentorship held me accountable to the years-long project I had committed to and gave me the resources to return to it with total focus. Without this fellowship, photography may have gone onto the back burner of my life, but it provided the structure and resources to grow my practice and the body of work that means so much to me to finish.”
-Walker Bankson | 2025 Junior Fellow
Project Statement
In high school, the camera came to me as a tool of social discovery and care; I would go for long walks across redlined neighborhoods while photographing my best friend as she withered away from cancer. Photographs became a language for me to understand grief in both a personal and collective sense–a lifeline to my community and loved ones. The camera became a tool to see and learn about my experience in relation to the histories a broken school system did not provide.
In 2023, I began teaching photography three times per week at the high school I attended in Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilmington’s history is defined by its repeated systematic destruction of its black middle class; in 1898, white supremacists murdered a significant portion of the town’s thriving black population in the only successful coups-d’etat in US history. During the integration of its schools, nine black high school students were imprisoned for peacefully protesting the lack of resources they faced and were not pardoned by the state until 2012. Today, these histories remain unspoken in the classroom, where hundreds of books centering black and queer experiences have been banned.
I provided 37 students with cameras, film, and free film processing, founding a workshop-based teaching practice centered mostly around writing. I had students write about the photographs they would like to make and their dreams, home, and ways of seeing the world around them. I’m proud to have fostered an environment where I had no access to a viable arts education and hope to open the same doors for my students that the camera opened for me.
The pictures I’ve made harness the tension between adolescence and the abject at one of the most under-resourced schools in America. My work frames the marginalized students whose lived realities are harshly controlled by legislation and offers them a photographic voice of their own.
2025 Junior Fellows: Walker Bankson | Sam Gulliver | Rosemary Haynes | Jasmine Huang | Jess Rhodes | Lawren Simmons