Kendal Walker: “Photography Has Always Given Me a Deep Sense of Purpose”

“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 in London, Walker grew up in Utah, and the distinct atmosphere of that mountainous, small town landscape continues to permeate her work. Recurring images of lone figures in empty landscapes foster a pervading feeling of solitude. The textures of the environment are often 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 latest photo book, Tracks, is composed of photographs taken from the last eight years of her archive, but its origins may date back 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 memory, 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 may not be linear but it is diaristic; an erratic, fragmented autobiography. 

From this blizzard of images, meaning 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, photography is a way to not just record the world but 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 images from the past reveals new meanings in the pictures. Revisiting the places of our youth also gives us the opportunity to reevaluate our understanding of those sites – 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 particular photograph depicting looping tyre marks in the snowy surface of the car 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 town before escaping to the big city is likely to understand a complicated and ambivalent relationship to home. Tracing the looping paths she has made as she circles the places that make life legible to her, Tracks evokes a powerful sense of attachment and estrangement with childhood places 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 published 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.