Everything is possible in Tim Walker’s extravagantly exuberant world: pastel-coloured Persian cats pose under clematis bushes; girls are suspended bait-like on giant fishhooks; horses are photographed inside a house, while white rabbits happily hop around a room. In each picture there is a certain English eccentricity and at times there is also an irresistible overdose of kitschness that has the power of transporting you to a faraway magic land. London-based Tim Walker might just be 37 but during the last 15 years he has definitely become one of the most famous photographers around.
Walker developed his interest in photography while archiving images by Cecil Beaton at London’s Condé Naste. He later studied photography at Exeter Art College and did a short apprenticeship with Richard Avedon in New York. His career officially began when he was placed 3rd in the Independent Young Photographer of the Year Awards. After working for a few UK-based newspapers, Walker started doing shoots for the British and Italian editions of Vogue, W, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair.
As his portrait work shifted towards fashion, Walker’s idealised the English countryside, a landscape he knew well, transfiguring it with his dreamy and hallucinated visions. His props became famous in the fashion world for being absolutely over-the-top. For a Christmas photo shoot he once used an enormous amount of objects, including ballerina tutus, Christmas trees, ostrich eggs, gigantic plastic hands and a horse. Often compared to Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson, Irving Penn and Will McBride, Walker has a fundamental secret: he photographs his models as if they were characters, real protagonists of his fairy tales and not just stunning young women wearing spectacular dresses.
Walker’s 15 years of wonderful humorous and dramatic images are celebrated during an exhibition at London’s Design Museum. The show features a first section dedicated to his formative years and plenty of images from his best photo shoots, such as Lily Cole on a spiral staircase at Whadwan, Gujarat, India; models Erin O’Connor, Jacquetta Wheeler and Lily Cole, posing with a Rolls Royce in a rose garden in Colchester, and Lisa Cant dressed like a Playboy bunny girl surrounded by eighty white rabbits. 
Surrealism inspires the photographer in Coco Rocha’s cloud room shot that echoes Magritte’s cloud paintings, while his genuine love for children’s picture books and his obsessive attention for details prevail in other images. The magic of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland haunts Walker, who also used as the inspiration for one of his haute couture shots Bertha and Florence K. Upton’s 1895 book The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg.
It took three set designers and around 20 people to arrange the shot in which some of the book characters were recreated. Absurd and fabulous, ingenuous and sensual, these pictures are a reminder of the magic intrinsic to the world of fashion.
The exhibition also features some of the props used in the various photo shoots, such as a giant glove and a camera, and Walker’s sketchbooks. The latter are particularly interesting as they are collages of images, articles and other random chaotic materials that the photographer uses as the starting point to get further ideas for his shoots.
Though baroque and bizarre, Walker’s colourful work is mesmerising and proves that the beauty of fashion photography stands in its escapist quality. Those who don’t understand this simple truism will be forever doomed to live in a grey and boring world; all the others will be admitted to Tim Walker’s paradise, a strange land of marvels and wonders.
“Tim Walker Pictures” in association with Jigsaw is at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 2YD, UK, until 28th September 2008. The exhibition is accompanied by the hardback volume “Pictures by Tim Walker”, published by teNeues, and also available in limited Collector’s and Special Editions.
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