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” 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.”—Tim Walker

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.

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. 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. 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

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 ‘parallel 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. 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. 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.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.

Tim Walker: Wonderful Things continues at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London until 8 March 2020. 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. 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. 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.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...’ 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. 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. 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.”

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.

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. 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. 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?”