Tim Walkerâs photographs have entranced the readers of Vogue, month by month, for over a decade. Extravagant staging and romantic motifs characterise his unmistakable style. After concentrating on photographic stills for 15 years, Walker is now also making moving film.
Born in England in 1970, Walkerâs interest in photography began at the CondĂ© Nast library in London where he worked on the Cecil Beaton archive for a year before university. After a three-year BA Honors degree in Photography at Exeter College of Art, Walker was awarded third prize as The Independent Young Photographer Of The Year.
Upon graduation in 1994, Walker worked as a freelance photographic assistant in London before moving to New York City as a full time assistant to Richard Avedon. When he returned to England, he initially concentrated on portrait and documentary work for British newspapers. At the age of 25 he shot his first fashion story for Vogue, and has photographed for the British, Italian, and American editions, as well as W Magazine and LOVE Magazine ever since.
Walker staged his first major exhibition at the Design Museum, London in 2008. This coincided with the publication of his book âPicturesâ published by teNeues.
In 2010 Walkerâs first short film, âThe Lost Explorerâ was premiered at Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and went on to win best short film at the Chicago United Film Festival, 2011.
2012 saw the opening of Walkerâs âStory Tellerâ photographic exhibition at Somerset House, London. The exhibition coincided with the publication of his book, âStory Tellerâ published by Thames and Hudson. In a 2013 collaboration with Lawrence Mynott and Kit Hesketh-Harvey, he also released The Granny Alphabet, a unique collection of portraiture and illustration celebrating grandmothers.
Walker received the âIsabella Blow Award for Fashion Creatorâ from The British Fashion Council in 2008 as well as the Infinity Award from The International Center of Photography in 2009. In 2012 Walker received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society.
The Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London include Walkerâs photographs in their permanent collections.
Walker is a unique photographer because he works for the âfashion industry,â but is more concerned with creating a dreamscape for audiences. âIâm not so motivated by fashion and brands,â explains Tim Walker. Given that Walkerâs work is most frequently found between the glossy covers of high-end fashion magazines â Love, i-D and of course the myriad international imprints of Vogue, to name but a few â this statement makes for an interesting juxtaposition. The incongruence is only exacerbated in context of our meeting at Somerset House to mark the opening of his Mulberry-sponsored exhibition (and recently published book) Story Teller. Collating the dramatic dreamscapes of Walkerâs photographs, not just in the large format pictorial form to which photography is so often consigned in gallery spaces but rather in an immersive and tactile pseudo-reality enabled in part by the inclusion of the props and design that set them apart, Story Teller is Walker in microcosm: a bridge between two worlds.
Story Teller is a fitting collection: inclusive and representative of Walkerâs extensive body of work and his own personality rather than reflective of the closed-off nature and widespread exclusivity of the fashion industry with which he finds himself partnered in a strange symbiosis. âIâm more interested in whoâll let me do what I want to do,â he says. âI think that Iâve always used the fashion industry as a mechanism to fund and support my work; and if they let me and theyâre happy then thatâs fine.â
The transcendence of Walkerâs work is marked by its appreciation in the wider field of photographic arts. While it is true that the 42 year old Britonâs work has been featured more than that of any other photographer, almost month by month, in the pages of Vogue, there are also images from his portfolio hanging as permanent fixtures at the Victoria & Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2008 he staged his first major solo exhibition, in conjunction with the publication of his first book Pictures, at The Design Museum and in 2009 received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York. Indeed, Walkerâs work is more than the sum of its parts. Like the artist Mark Rothko, whose expansive canvases leave room for the viewerâs thoughts to fill, the photographerâs dreamlike fantasies are a world created not just for himself but for his audience.
 "I love beautiful clothes," admits Walker. "Clothing takes my breath away when it's exquisite. But fashion is something that's not my leading direction as a photographer. I don't actually care for fashion, but I do care about beautiful clothes. And when you're working for Vogue you see all these designers and then the stylist says, 'What about this dress?' And you go, 'That really is a beautifully made dress.' You don't want to do anything else but photograph it. Fashion for me is just a massive dressing-up box. There's always something black, there's always something baggy. In fashion there is always something you can mix together that becomes the costume in the play."
Play is the word he comes back to again and again. Walker grew up in Dorset, part of a nuclear family (mother, father, brother), spent his childhood poring over the pages of Tintin books, and playing outdoors. The picture he paints of it is coloured in happiness. You can see that childhood in his photographs, in their lightness, their sense of fun, their creamy, sun-dappled full fatness. "I think there are aspects of being a child that are too good to lose as you grow up. And I think that being a photographer allows me to still look at things with wonder. It's a total high I get."
Just as Walker was putting British fashion photography on the international map, he was also mapping Britishness on to his pictures, cramming them full of references to national folklore, social history, English literature and fairy tales. And central to this were the props, costumes and sets he devised with the set designers Simon Costin, Shona Heath, Andy Hillman and Rhea Thierstein. 'It's the set design of my work that interests me the most,' Walker says now of the mesmerising scenarios they created together - models emerging from the pages of magazines, living-room interiors set up in the middle of fields, tents pitched inside country houses. It wasn't the slick execution or verisimilitude of the sets that made Walker's images work, rather the opposite: their obvious artifice and sense of whimsy that created a lightness and gentility. 'The kind of theatrical photographs I take are so in danger of being kitsch and gimmicky,' he says. 'The performances are slightly hammy; it's a dangerous line to tread. The sets are a way of bringing the picture back to something beautiful.'
Walker's love of handicraft and the material aspects of image-making extends to the way he presents his photographs. In 2008 he published Pictures, a book documenting his first 12 years of work. Though it was immensely successful at the time, he can't open it now without seeing mistakes. 'I'd never done a book before and I had so much to say that everything came out like visual diarrhoea.' So four years on, he was taking no chances with Tim Walker: Story Teller, the handsome monograph that accompanies the Somerset House show. He sought out the renowned New York-based art director Ruth Ansel to ensure a clean, airy layout and above all a rigorous edit.
'I first met Ruth when I assisted Richard Avedon and she was his in-house art director; I used to change her light bulbs and empty her bins,' Walker says. 'I spent three months collating the images before she came along and said, "This is repetitive. That's gotta go." It was a torturous process but I'm thrilled with the result.' The idea of turning Walker's quotes into typographic shapes to be interspersed between the images came to Ansel courtesy of Lewis Carroll. 'Tim's love of fashion is all about telling a story, so when he introduced the notion of fairy tales, I began to explore Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,' she says. 'Once I saw how the fanciful shapes created pace through the book, we were off.'
The most noticeable development in the four years' work featured in the book is its shift away from the highly detailed tableaux of Walker's earlier photography towards simpler sets and darker themes. There is also greater focus on characterisation, as expressed in his stripped-down 'tabletop portraits'. This is in part owing to his experience directing the 2010 short film The Lost Explorer, an adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel. Walker says working with a screenwriter forced him to rethink his approach to narrative. 'The most important thing about film is the story and the character and then your visualisation,' he says. 'The words are the key.' He would love to direct a feature film, so spent his summer holiday in the cottage he owns in the Cheviot Hills, 'reading everything I could get my hands on that could work as a film'.
As much as Walker wants the challenge of adopting a new medium, he hasn't lost sight of the magic of the old one. All pictures included in the book and exhibition were shot entirely on film. He is not a digital refusenik, he says, but he laments how digital photography has limited the quality and especially the colour range of fashion photography. 'If you look at magazines now, there's sort of a common colour across them all.' And don't get him started on the subject of digital monitors, and how their introduction into the portrait studio has destroyed the delicate one-on-one relationship between the photographer and the sitter. Walker's world is often described as nostalgic, but one senses that the past isn't merely sentimental for him; it is also political. 'I'm resisting proceeding without caution,' he says. 'Culture and society are moving so quickly that I think we need to ask whether in throwing out the rubbish so readily, there might be a few gems in there that we're not quite ready to get rid of. Like femininity. Or innocence. Or our sense of wonderment.'
http://www.timwalkerphotography.com/articles/interview-with-tim-walker
http://www.timwalkerphotography.com/articles/the-wonderful-world-of-tim-walker
http://www.timwalkerphotography.com/articles/tim-walkers-thrilling-fashion-photographs-go-on-show
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