He, however, is anything but. Over the past three decades,
the name Tim Walker has become synonymous with
pictures of epic proportions, Vogue’s pages becoming a
fantasy world of crying skeletons, giant wasps, automatons
with minds of their own, biplanes made of French loaves,
Spitfires crash-landed in remote country houses, and giant
owls under chandeliers. He would think nothing of igniting
Dante’s Inferno in the middle of a stately home; bringing
a herd of animals into a drawing room; covering the outside
walls of an English manor house with hundreds of
multicoloured balloons; or diverting a stream so it rushed
through the interior of a castle.
His first pictures appeared in Vogue in 1997, but it was, he
says, a shoot at Glastonbury in 1998 that kick-started it all.
Kate Phelan, now a contributing fashion director at Vogue,
styled it, and she has been his closest collaborator ever since.
The new show contains a substantial retrospective section,
where many of these images can be seen. “When I look back
at the retrospective part of the show, it’s nearly all Kate. She’s
been such an incredibly
calm and enthusiastic
person for so long.”
The pictures they made
together are relics of a
glorious time in fashion
photography, when
ambition was never a
problem (and money only
occasionally so). But in
time, this way of working
had to give: “I was sinking
in a sea of complications
weighed down by big
plans, storyboards and
weather charts,” Tim says.
“I hadn’t yet learned that
making pictures is not
about trying too hard;
it’s all about a lightness.”
He goes on: “You’re in the
day. You’re in the summer.
You’re in the light...”
The main thrust of
the exhibition, though,
is entirely new work,
inspired by the V&A’s own
permanent collection. At first, the curators’ request that Tim
select some objects from the museum’s collections and relate
them to his own photography was too daunting a prospect.
“How on earth can I do it?” he recalls thinking at the time.
“It’s such an eclectic collection, and I wasn’t sure about an
object ‘inspiring’ a photograph. How do you unify things so
different in period, form, texture, emotional response?”
But he picked up the gauntlet (quite literally: the most
delicate Elizabethan glove, wrapped in copious amounts of
tissue paper), and has spent the past year and a half going
through the museum’s 145 galleries, meeting curators,
historians and technicians who would bring out of storage
objects for him to touch, to hold, to tilt up to the light. The
result? Ten new series of photographs – or “universes”, as
he puts it – each one a love letter to the V&A’s collection,
about which Tim can become animated. “There’s this tiny,
tiny Chinese snuffbox from about 1745 with gold lacquer
mounts and inlaid with gemstones showing a lady picking
moonflowers, which it says here, only bloom under a full
moon. Isn’t that beautiful?”“In the end,” he continues, “I decided I needed to see
everything. Everything. Do you know they have these
extraordinary arrows from Lahore, which are still toxic!”
He adds, resignedly, “I don’t think they’ll let us put them
on display... And they’ve got Peter Brook’s collection of
ephemera from his film of Lord of the Flies. That was such
a moment in my reading. I could have been any one of
those stranded boys...”
During his internship at Vogue in the 1980s, the magazine’s
then fashion director, Sarajane Hoare (“I met her in Claridge’s
for a glass of wine and some crisps... I mean, I was no one
but she took an interest – amazing”), advised him to go to
New York after college, specifically to the studio of Arthur
Elgort, where he would learn about “movement and light”.
But in the end, it was Richard Avedon who took on Walker- as fourth assistant, the lowest of the low. It was there that
he learned what to do – and, more specifically, what not to do.
“Avedon’s studio was,” he says, “a brutal regime. In the end
Dick fired me for not running fast enough. If the phone
rang, you had to leap like a
mountain goat to get there.
I just wasn’t that person.
I was always setting off
the studio alarm when I
came in first thing in the
morning. And as he lived
on the top floor, Dick would
come running down the
stairs in his pyjamas. I
lasted a year. My father
was seriously ill, in fact he
was dying, and Dick just
would not let me go back
to see him. He was utterly
heartless, but what an
education. In the end, I
don’t resent him. He was
brilliant. His sense of
drama, the wind machine,
the women, the models...”
I leave Tim to his pint-
sized V&A and his various
worlds. He’s wondering out
loud whether he should
include – at this admittedly
late stage – some portraits
he took yesterday of former model Penelope Tree. “She’s so
great,” he says, “with such a calmness and so... she’s just
so nice.” And he should. Not just because she is, but because
the pictures are completely beautiful. And what’s more, they
echo back through the years directly to 1968 and Avedon’s
photographs of a young Tree, just as she was starting out.
Perhaps the greatest gift Avedon gave Tim, when he was
starting out, was the generosity of spirit that you see in his
dynamic photographs – even if he never quite got round to
expressing it to that fourth assistant, barely out of his teens.
But here we are, many years down the line, and I think what
a journey it’s been for the slightly lost boy from Guildford.
“The education I’ve had going to the V&A. I’ve been
engaging with the most insanely beautiful objects, touching
them and hearing stories about them. The curators are so
passionate about what they look after. The things I’ve seen.
The conversations I’ve had. I really don’t know what I’ll do
after all this is over. Can you imagine? Can you imagine?” n
Tim Walker: Wonderful Things is at the V&A, SW7, from
21 September to 8 March 2020
“I WAS SINKING IN A
SEA OF COMPLICATIONS
WEIGHED DOWN BY BIG
PLANS, STORYBOARDS AND
WEATHER CHARTS”
1
TIM WALKER STUDIO
1, 3 & 4 Handle With
Care, London 2018, is an
ode to the conservation
work of the V&A, and the
reverence with which it
preserves its collections.
2 & 6 The Box of
Delights, London 2018.
The set is a replica of a
miniature garden hidden
inside a 17th-century
casket embroidered
by a young girl.
5 Why Not Be Oneself?,
Derbyshire 2018. Tilda
Swinton plays Edith
Sitwell, whose large and
brightly coloured jewels
are in the museum, for
a shoot at Renishaw Hall,
the writer’s family home10-19-WELL-TimWalker.indd 212 08/08/2019 09:38