Tim Walker: Wonderful Things

Product Information

As a fashion photographer, I’ve always been concerned with presenting clothing as something living. It was this concern that attracted me to Dieric Bouts’s The Annunciation. Bouts has a sympathy toward fabric: the dresses worn by the Virgin Mary and the angel feel almost three-dimensional. There is a commitment to depicting something alive and not flat. I want my pictures to live, and I really notice the life in these paintings. In Lucas Cranach the Elder’s A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion, I’m interested in the comparative nudity and what it suggests about ourselves. Rather than using historical costumes, I wanted the challenge of using the contemporary fashion Zoe Bedeaux selected, complemented by James Merry’s masks and UV makeup by Hungry.

The main exhibition space contrasts with the brightness of the first gallery to reveal a darker environment, rich with texture, colour and sound. Ten evocative room sets display Walker’s new series of photographs inspired by the V&A. Each set includes a group of V&A objects selected by Walker, displayed alongside the photographs they inspired. Shona Heath makes use of the cavernous exhibition gallery to display elements of the photoshoots’ sets and props at great height. Published to accompany the V&A's mesmerizing exhibition Tim Walker: Wonderful Things, this catalogue is a journey through the creative mind of one of the world's most inventive photographers. Published to accompany the V&A’s mesmerizing exhibition Tim Walker: Wonderful Things, this book is a journey through the creative mind of one of the world’s most inventive photographers. It presents more than 100 compelling photographs, from 10 magical photoshoots inspired by objects from the V&A’s enormous and eclectic collection. Tim Walker said: “To me, the V&A has always been a palace of dreams – it’s the most inspiring place in the world. The museum’s collection is so wide and eclectic, and I think that’s why it resonates with me so much. Many of the objects that I saw during my research at the museum made my heart swell and I wanted to try to create a photograph that would relate not only to the physical presence and beauty of that object, but also to my emotional reaction to it. Each new shoot is a love letter to an object from the V&A collection, and an attempt to capture my encounter with the sublime. For me, beauty is everything. I’m interested in breaking down the boundaries that society has created, to enable more varied types of beauty and the wonderful diversity of humanity to be celebrated. Preparing for this exhibition over the past three years has pushed me into new territories, which is very exciting, and I’m at a stage in my life where I feel brave enough to do that.” Tim Walker was born in England in 1970. At the age of 18 he started working at the library of the media company Condé Nast. There he encounters the work of the English photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton and his interest in photography began.

Wonderful Things is on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, through 8 March; Wonderful People is on show at Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, through 25 January Exploring the V&A’s historical paintings from South Asia reminded me of how I feel when I’m in that part of the world. I’ve always been drawn to India . . . the often-chaotic haphazardness contrasting with an almost palpable sense of cosmic harmony. An embroidered box, a painting of Krishna, a photograph of Edith Sitwell – these are some of the artworks and artefacts that British photographer Tim Walker took inspiration from, after a year of research at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. “It was the objects that made it happen, they revealed themselves in serendipitous ways,” Walker tells BBC Culture at the preview of the new exhibition Wonderful Things. The show is a labyrinthine, immersive journey through 10 wildly imaginative photoshoots. As Walker puts it: “Each shoot is a love letter to an object, sometimes several objects.” It’s rich, fun, and exuberant, but also slightly overwhelming, and I was left with the sense of Walker’s work being a little overshadowed. Walker famously started out working in the Cecil Beaton Archive and assisting Richard Avedon, and like them, he’s capable of shooting very beautiful, refined images – many of which are on display in the V&A show. There’s just a sense of having to get through quite a lot to see them. Walker’s a great photographer and has lots of good ideas of his own; for me at least, it would have been good to have seen a little more of him in this exhibition, and a little less of the many other wonderful things. Radical, exciting and original, Tim Walker is one of the world's foremost photographers, an energetic, imaginative force who conjures other worlds through his images.

The catalogue contains over 100 compelling photographs, from ten magical photoshoots inspired by objects from the V&A's enormous and wide-ranging collection, alongside conversations between the set designers, stylists, hair and make-up artists, models and muses who collaborate with Walker to bring his imagination to life. Previously unpublished behind-the-scenes imagery, revealing Walker's creative process from preliminary sketches, through his detailed research in the labyrinth of storerooms and galleries at the V&A, to his spectacular final pictures, also feature. We all have a need to store our secrets in a private place that we love. A diary, a scrapbook, or even a phone. The golden key and embroidered casket from the V&A collection feel like an expression of that need to escape. The casket contains a spectacular secret garden. It’s an object of fantasy and transformation, suggesting a world in which you can safely be whoever you want to be, like the London club scene where freedom of expression reigns supreme. Each shoot is a total love letter to an object from the V&A, sometimes several objects. My relationship to objects is like falling in love with someone. It relates to how we interact as people, how you become best friends with someone. It's a search for a new friend.—Tim Walker worlds’ of his unrestrained imagination (often realised by longtime collaborator and set designer Shona Heath). Think Cate Blanchett standing in a moonscape surrounded by dead tree trunks, strapped into a pair of skis, outfitted in a Comme des Garçons dress with hair styled by Julien d’Ys. The photographer himself is quiet and unassuming. A behind-the-scenes look at the creative process of Tim Walker, one of the world’s most innovative and sought-after photographersEach shoot is a total love letter to an object from the V&A, sometimes several objects. My relationship to objects is like falling in love with someone. It relates to how we interact as people, how you become best friends with someone. It’s a search for a new friend...’ Another room, Pen & Ink, takes the whiplash graphic lines of Aubrey Beardsley’s provocative illustrations from the 1890s as a starting point. A green velvet-clad room displays some of Beardsley’s best-known works, leading into a stark white photographic studio, filled with 10 photographs capturing Walker’s witty take on Beardsley’s masterpieces. Tim Walker: Wonderful Things continues at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London until 8 March 2020. Important themes in Tim Walker’s work are nostalgic childhood memories and his love of nature, while subjects like identity and emotions are central to the exhibition as well. Walker wants to embrace diversity with his work.

Both series depict a fabricated world in which chaos can be contained. Warfare is confined to padded cells; a young man’s desire to a garden. These are spaces of managed disruption. “If you can’t see a utopia in our existence,” the photographer states, “why can’t you make one?” In recent years, Walker has embraced moving film. His first short film, The Lost Explorer, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and went on to win Best Short Film at the Chicago United Film Festival in 2011. Walker’s acclaimed publications include Pictures (2008), Story Teller (2012), The Granny Alphabet (2013, in collaboration with Lawrence Mynott and Kit Hesketh-Harvey), and The Garden of Earthly Delights (2017). He received the Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator from The British Fashion Council in 2008 and the Infinity Award from The International Center of Photography in 2009. In 2012, Walker received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society. Walker began his career at the age of twenty-five when he was given his first shoot in Vogue – to which he has contributed regularly since – and remains best known for his photographic work in fashion magazines including W Magazine, i-D, Vanity Fair and Another Man. His subjects include models and celebrities from the worlds of film, music, literature, art and theatre, styled in couture and positioned within the ‘parallelTim Walker: Wonderful Things, which opens on Saturday, plays with expectations in many ways. At a preview the photographer – whose twisted fairytale aesthetic has made him one of British fashion’s most prominent names – described the show as not a retrospective “but the end of a chapter”. Each shoot is a total love letter to an object from the V&A, sometimes several objects. My relationship to objects is like falling in love with someone. It relates to how we interact as people, how you become best friends with someone. It’s a search for a new friend.”—Tim Walker Tilda Swinton, Grace Jones, Karen Elson and Grayson Perry feature in largest-ever exhibition on photographer Tim Walker – with over 150 new works inspired by the V&A’s collection. Tim Walker’s works straddle the realms of art historian and photographer, endowing refreshing perspectives on the museum's collections through his evocative new creations. Breathing life into objects from the museum’s collections, Walker’s captivating photography blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, placing the extraordinary center stage. His images, meticulously crafted with the precision of a sculptor, resonate as symphonies of color, texture, and emotion.

A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion, about 1526, Lucas Cranach the Elder. Oil on panel. Getty Museum Tim Walker studied photography at Exeter College of Art. After graduating he worked as a freelance photographic assistant in London and subsequently moved to New York City where he became full-time assistant to the renowned fashion photographer Richard Avedon. Aged only 25, Tim Walker shot his first big assignment for Vogue. This was the start of his career as a fashion photographer and he has since been photographing for the British, Italian, and American editions of Vogue, as well as for leading fashion and style titles such as W, i-D, AnOther, and LOVE Magazine. Just like Cecil Beaton, Tim Walker photographs his models in theatrical settings. His work is characterized by a rich imaginative creativity and filled with fairytale references. The fact that Tim Walker finds inspiration in Surrealism and Romanticism is reflected in his choice of themes such as childhood, nature, or emotions, and his praise of the individual. Walker’s talent enables him to draw the spectator into his elaborately crafted dreamworlds. Tim Walkers photography says so much on it’s own and is just mesmerising to consume without the need for explanations but I just love the little glimpses of his process he reveals in his books. Three years ago he was asked to create a series of photographs inspired by the V&A’s archive. His choice of artefacts appears here alongside those works. The semi-shrouded McQueen dress is paired with a series of photographs about the V&A’s curators and conservationists. In the pictures, Karen Elson’s long limbs emerge from wooden dress boxes and polyester-chiffon clouds. These ghosts – as the set designer Shona Heath described them at the preview – are also suspended and illuminated in the rafters of the exhibition space, floating in the darkness like jellyfish.Photographers are trying to make sense of this world, put a frame around it,” he continues, drawing a rectangle in the air, “so that they can garden within the walls and make everything look pretty… but they know that outside those walls it’s wilderness. As a photographer you’re trying to take screenshots of life and show that it resonates with your sense of what is beautiful. But the decisive moment is chaotic.”