Don Wallen

born Manitowec, Wisconsin, 1945; died Seattle, Washington, 1997

BiographyDon Wallen received his first training in photography in the Air Force when he was in his early 20s as an investigative photographer of air crashes. He returned to Seattle in 1969 and began work as a staff photographer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. From 1973 to 1974 he worked for the School for Visual Arts in New York, then returned to the Northwest as chief photographer for an alternative Seattle publication Today Newspaper. Here he came to know a different side of Seattle and made the varied people he encountered his primary subject. He became a freelance photographer for various regional publications in 1978. His award-winning work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the country. Wallen died of AIDS-related complications in 1997 leaving behind a large and diverse body of work. University of Washington Special Collections holds an archive of over 800 of his images.

For an extended biography and to see an archive of Wallen’s work visit https://content.lib.washington.edu/hupyweb/wallen.html

[accessed September 2017]

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