Tim Walker: Wonderful Things

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A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion, about 1526, Lucas Cranach the Elder. Oil on panel. Getty Museum The poet Dame Edith Sitwell (British, 1887– 1964) had a striking personal style and was incredibly photogenic, especially in her later years as she grew into her extraordinary looks.
Her flamboyant wardrobe included flowing brocade robes, velvet gowns, turbans, golden shoes, and huge colorful rings. 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. His creativity as a photographer is unmatched today and when his ideas are melded with some of the fashion industries most respected and adept creatives the images that are made are just astonishing. This is celebrated in this book to accompany Tim Walker’s V&A exhibition ‘Wonderful Things’ where interviews with Walker’s collaborators and himself provide a much broader perspective into how his images come to be. Being able to explore the inspiration behind his pictures makes you appreciate the talent and creativity involved even more than just experiencing the image. It’s refreshing to hear from other people who are apart of the creation of an image as it’s often the photographer that gets sole recognition. It’s testament to Walker’s inclusivity and celebration of diversity whether that’s race, gender, beauty and all variations in society and his subsequent desire to let those people feel heard and respected through his images. 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.

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. 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 Those parallel worlds,” he says, gesturing towards the photographs of fantastical sets for which he is famous, “are very meticulously put together, but they don’t work if that’s all they are. It becomes very stiff and predictable. What I always look for is to create the world and then for the wind to rip through the set and for everything to fall down, or for someone to walk in who isn’t meant to be there, or for the person you’re photographing to turn around to look at something. It’s where something went wrong that makes the photograph stronger and more telling.” 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 displays 10 new photographer projects as part of V&A exhibition

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. 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. At the heart of the exhibition are ten new photographic series that are directly influenced by the treasures in the V&A’s huge collection. The wide-ranging and eclectic collection of this museum for art and design is a source of inspiration for Walker. Together with curators, conservators and technicians he roamed the impressive galleries, depots, and hidden nooks and crannies of the museum in search of objects to spark his imagination. Along the way he encountered luminous stained-glass windows, vivid Indian miniature paintings, jewelled snuffboxes, erotic illustrations, golden shoes, and a 65-metre-long photograph of the Bayeux Tapestry, the largest photograph in the museum’s collection. These and many other rare objects inspired Walker’s monumental photographs in the exhibition.

It’s such a brilliant parallel—to have one painter obsessed by dress and fabric, and then another depicting a wild nudity. In the photographs I’ve made here, I’ve tried to marry the two. I wanted to capture the nudity of Cranach and the cloth of Bouts, the violence of Cranach and the peace of Bouts. To create pictures that feel alive and provoke questions as these two great paintings do. 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. 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.” 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…'

Beyond the exhibition, The Modern Media Gallery in the V&A’s Photography Centre screens Walker’s newest film, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, a ballet performed by Harry Alexander and Jordan Robson, in costumes inspired by paper dolls in the V&A Museum of Childhood. Walker rewrote the original Hans Christian Andersen tale to create a moving gay love story, narrated by actress Gwendoline Christie. 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 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.” In fact, the whole experience of creating Wonderful Things has been “healing” says Walker. In what way? “There was a point where I was having a bad time. It was a low point. But by engaging with beauty, it put my predicament into perspective. It was a balm that elevated me in that low period, and I managed to ascend my mood by engaging with a 16th-Century stained-glass window, or an embroidered casket, or a Constable painting of clouds. For me it was a meditation and medication.” 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. 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. 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”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. 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. The art director, who creates the sets for Walker’s pictures, describes the exhibition as “a gift” and Walker as a great collaborator: “We genuinely inspire each other. We both had a good grounding in art history before we met each other, and we shared a love of many things, including photographic influences and children’s book illustration.”