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. 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. 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”

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...’ 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…' 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. 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. 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.”

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. 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 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.”

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.” 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.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 A behind-the-scenes look at the creative process of Tim Walker, one of the world’s most innovative and sought-after photographers 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. 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”. 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.

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’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. 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. The exhibition Tim Walker: Wonderful Things is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from May 2 through August 20, 2023. 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.”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. Rather than using historical costumes, I wanted the challenge of using the contemporary fashion Zoe Bedeaux selected, complemented by James Merry’s masks and UV makeup by Hungry. 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. James Spencer, the central figure in this photo shoot, burst out of his family home and into that world dressed as a beautiful woman. These seeds of escapism are sown into the very house in which you find yourself, reminiscent of the constraints of all our childhood homes. 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 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. 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. 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.

Wonderful Things

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