Tim Walker: Wonderful Things

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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.” 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. 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. A behind-the-scenes look at the creative process of Tim Walker, one of the world’s most innovative and sought-after photographers A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion, about 1526, Lucas Cranach the Elder. Oil on panel. Getty Museum

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. 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. Tim 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”. 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.” 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.”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. 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. 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. In 2016, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the world’s largest museum of applied and decorative arts, invited the internationally acclaimed fashion photographer Tim Walker to delve into its vast and eclectic collection. Walker selected an array of “wonderful things,” the art and design objects that served as inspiration for the series of nine photo shoots at the heart of this exhibition. In the same spirit, the Getty Museum invited Walker to explore its collection and embark on a tenth photo session. Photographs inspired by the two paintings Walker chose are on view here for the first time.

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 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. 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.” 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.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. Tim Walker: Wonderful Things is the latest in the museum’s ambitious series of projects working in collaboration with contemporary practitioners. The exhibition opens just under a year after the launch of Phase One of the V&A Photography Centre, a new space to showcase the museum’s world-class photographic holdings. 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. 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. 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.

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...’ There’s no denying the magical, fairy tale quality of Walker’s vision – a word often used to describe his work is ‘fantastical’. But at a time when the world is full of challenges – climate crisis, poverty, political instability – where does ‘fantastical’ fashion and photography fit in? It is an existential question facing the fashion world at the moment. Are such things merely an indulgence, frivolity, a form of escapism? No, in Brown’s view. “There’s space in the creative world for a broad spectrum of work,” says the curator. “We need functional clothes but we need to express ourselves, our personalities, our emotion, our mood – through our dress. And this exhibition is fantasy, yes, but it connects to the real world.” 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?”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. 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. 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 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