LONDON, United Kingdom—Any cynic who says London is drab, gray or sullen should step into the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum’s ongoing exhibition, Tim Walker: Wonderful Things. The British portrait and fashion photographer’s body of work is playful, colorful and joyful, and just what one needs in a 2020 that’s off to a disastrous start.
I was, somewhat, sad when I missed the Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams showcase, so I thought the next best thing was to buy the book about the exhibit. But when I went to the V&A in late October last year, I was drawn to the crowd going to Galleries 38 and 38a, just to the side of the bookshop.
There is fantasy. There is surrealism. Then there is Tim Walker’s contorted reality. His photographs are whimsical, fantastical and, oftentimes, allegorical. It’s what I imagine magic realism to be. It helps that in each of the 10 rooms of the exhibit, Walker’s notes are there as if he was guiding you himself.
“To me, the V&A has always been a palace of dreams—it’s one of the most inspiring places in the world. I was lucky enough to spend months delving into the wide and eclectic collection, and meeting many of the experts who care for the artifacts housed there. The photographs you are about to see are directly influenced by my experience of the treasures I encountered,” Walker explains in his notes.
I’m more familiar with Avedon and Penn, Meisel and Demarchelier, Leibovitz and von Unwerth. Walker, I was unfamiliar with beyond his frequent collaborations with fellow British fashion icons Tilda Swinton, Karen Elson and Kate Moss. And, of course, the 2018 Pirelli calendar, which featured an all-black cast that reimagined Alice in Wonderland, with Duckie Thot as Alice and RuPaul as the Queen of Hearts.
Walker is said to be the first living photographer to exhibit at the V&A. But the show isn’t a retrospective, as he was especially invited to create high-concept, high-fashion images inspired by the museum’s vast collections of ancient and contemporary artworks. Each room becomes more immersive and movie set-like as designed by Walker’s long-term collaborator and set designer, Shona Heath. It will run until March 22, with ticket prices at £15.
“Each picture is an attempt to capture the emotion I felt on meeting these objects, and the stories they conjured in my mind. As I wandered around the museum, I imagined how it must have felt to the archaeologist Howard Carter when he first encountered the sublime contents of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922,” Walker writes, quoting: “As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold…I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, “‘Yes, wonderful things.’”
In the room “Off With Their Heads,” Walker writes: “As a young photographer, my first simple imaginings gradually became enormously complicated fantasies. I’d stop at nothing to drive them into the tiny 35mm film canister—the more impossible, the better. I was so in love with the fairyland I was dragging up from my subconscious. The cat had to be lilac, the Indian elephant a particular blue, the enormous doll had to be bigger.”
“Iluminations” is about the stained glasses at the V&A. “Lord of the Flies” is inspired by the book by William Golding and the film by Peter Brooks, about British schoolboys whose plane crashed in the Pacific, thus Walker’s pictures about “children left to their own devices and their imaginations running riot.” In “Cloud 9,” inspired by the V&A’s historical paintings from South Asia, celebrates his love for India, and its vibrancy and mysticism. “Li’l Dragon” is about the museum’s intricately decorated snuffboxes (dating to about 1745), with Walker photographing contemporary clothes selected by the stylist Zoe Bedeaux.
“Handle with Care” is a “love letter to the conservators, curators and archivists” whose work is vital to the museum. Inspiration for the “Handle with Care” room: dress from “The Horn of Plenty” autumn/winter collection of Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), 2009. Models like Sgaire Wood (in Miu Miu), James Crewe (in Valentino) and Karen Elson (in Sarah Bruylant) pose like mannequins inside storage boxes coming to life.
Fashion is the biggest polluter in the world, and Walker is aware of that fact. In “Soldiers of Tomorrow,” which takes its cue from the Bayeux Tapestry, at 65 meters long, the biggest photograph that Walker has ever seen, he pleads for sustainability: “It inspired me to produce photographs that evoke both the chaos and the beauty of the tapestry. As the fashion industry can be very wasteful, I liked the idea of everything being recycled, homemade and hand knitted for this shoot. We reused things in different ways—old ironing boards became shields, vacuum cleaners became madcap medieval instruments. The figures are eco-warriors, the soldiers of tomorrow.”
Image credits: PHOTOS: TIM WALKER STUDIO