She has gained recognition for her ability to carefully convey subject matter that simultaneously engages the viewer perceptually, emotionally, viscerally and intellectually.

On graduation, she was awarded the Yale School of Art's Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship to photograph in the Yukon Territory of Canada.

In 1990, she accepted a teaching position with the Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta where she continues to reside.

Thalken's imagery evokes comparisons between taxidermy and embalming, humans and animals, life and death, and speaks to loss and grief.

The photographs, each scaled to the size of the debris pile, document the discarded remnants of daily life and the routines surrounding them.

Thalken describes this technique as a means to not only "dematerialize the animal in order to convey its spiritual nature", but also to suggest "“the duality of life and death and the uncertainty that lies between".

Fragments of An Elegy Photographed over the course of five years, these images primarily refer to the annual alligator harvests of coastal regions of Louisiana and the Florida Panhandle.