Inside Tim Walker’s Wonderful Things Exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles

Tim Walker at the V&A, London, 2019

The acclaimed British fashion photographer Tim Walker has spent decades immortalizing the ethereal and uncanny through his lens. Celebrated for his extraordinary creativity, his works encourage observers to see beyond the mundane to the magical. The current exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles builds upon his 2016 showcase at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, where Walker explored its vast collection and selected an array of “wonderful things” – vivid Indian miniature paintings, luminous stained glass windows, jeweled snuffboxes, golden shoes, and a 65m-long photograph of the Bayeux Tapestry – that served as inspiration for a series of nine shoots. In the same spirit, the Getty Museum invited Walker to survey its pieces and embark on an additional photo session. Images inspired by the two paintings Walker chose are on view at the museum for the first time.

Cloud 9, 2018

The first challenge in bringing an iconic V&A exhibition to the new space was to edit and distill the objects. “It required that I cut the list by approximately 40%,” shares Paul Martineau, the curator of the presentation. “I wanted the artwork to be very front and center, and less immersed in an environment, so that people could really look carefully at the work and appreciate its strengths. I think they walk away with a greater appreciation for the vision and artistry of the photographer.” The first section features more than 20 snapshots from Walker’s career as a fashion photographer. The following 10 segments each host museum collection objects, pictures, short films, and photographic sets, providing a behind-the-scenes look at Walker’s creative process.

Cloud 9, 2018

For the vibrant Out of the Woods section, the first artwork that captured Walker’s attention is a German Renaissance one by Cranach the Elder, titled A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion. Walker recalls the first time he saw it. “There’s nothing better than going to a museum and standing in front of a work of art and then encountering that object. It’s a very powerful experience; the time I went to the Getty I just saw the Cranach as something so supremely beautiful. The depiction of the feminine faces was the very thin eyebrows, the very translucent skin, that body shape…” With the second painting, The Annunciation by Dieric Bouts, Walker was drawn to “the beauty and the finesse of the depiction of fabric.”

Soldiers of Tomorrow, 2018

In the original Cranach painting, a muscular faun stands over a defeated lion. The faun’s posture is robust, his chest puffed out in a show of strength, his eyes reflecting a mixture of pride and primal satisfaction. The faun’s family huddle to the side, their expressions a blend of awe, fear, and relief. The wife is depicted as a beautiful figure, cradling a child in her arms, while the other child clings to her side. Their eyes are wide, staring at the fallen beast, encapsulating an innocent bewilderment at the violent spectacle before them. “There’s a clear division between the civilized world and the wild world,” explains Martineau. A master of storytelling, Walker’s interpretation of these works invites his audience into a world between a fairytale and a nightmare. The forest, brought into the third dimension, with longtime collaborator and set-designer Shona Heath, is dark, overgrown, and menacing. The makeup on the models, by Sam Bryant, shows painstaking attention to recreating brush strokes along the sinews of the body to give that lit-from-within appearance that is so distinctive of medieval art. The models, no longer passive and serene, often look provocatively at the camera. The images cause the viewer unease, but as one traverses through the labyrinth of Walker’s mind, his photographs continually invite them to question their perception of reality and beauty. “Walker celebrates unconventional beauty,” states Martineau. “And he does that in part by selecting models for this shoot that might not have been selected for mainstream fashion work, perhaps. He picks people that have a different look, often very androgynous.”

Box of Delights, 2018

Walker’s love for pictures started early in his life. An internship at the Cecil Beaton archive at the Condé Nast Library in London led him to study photography at Exeter College of Art. After graduating in 1994, Walker began his career as a freelance photographic assistant in London and then relocated to New York City to work as an assistant to famed fashion photographer Richard Avedon. Though Walker was fired from this role (he admits he was too slow for Avedon’s taste), his career was not derailed. He lensed his first story for British Vogue at the age of 25 and has been shooting for magazines ever since. The backbone of Walker’s distinctive style is his extraordinary ability to blur the lines between reality and fantasy. His works are characterized by surreal elements, opulent costuming, elaborate sets, and unexpected juxtapositions. His groundbreaking work has been featured prominently in publications including W Magazine and British and Italian Vogue. Commercially he has shot advertising campaigns for clients as wide-ranging as Barneys New York, Comme des Garçons, Gap, and Yohji Yamamoto. When the V&A approached him about the retrospective in 2016, at 46, he was among the youngest to receive such an honor.

Illuminations, 2018

For Walker, the camera is not just a tool for capturing beauty; it’s an instrument for communicating emotion and pushing boundaries, which he has done throughout his career. Walker’s images often feature diverse subjects, from world-famous models to unknown faces, and even non-human ones. This has helped challenge the conventional, often narrow, notions of beauty prevalent in the fashion industry. Within his prolific body of work, he has gained fame for iconic images such as those that pair models Edie Campbell and Karen Elson with a lion in an old English manor, shooting designer Alexander McQueen with a cigarette-smoking skull, and putting sculptured hair horns on frequent muse, Tilda Swinton. In 2018 he made headlines when producing the Pirelli calendar. The shoot was inspired by Alice in Wonderland but reimagined it as an all-Black stellar cast that included Naomi Campbell, Puff Daddy, RuPaul, and Whoopi Goldberg.

Lil’ Dragon, 2018

Walker’s team is instrumental to producing his mesmerizing photographs. “It’s a collaboration. It’s a classroom full of artists trying to articulate something, and I really lean on them,” says Walker of this creative alchemy. For the Getty display, his team first flew to Los Angeles to experience the paintings in person, and spent time researching Renaissance painting and aesthetics, before taking three days to embark on and complete the shoot. “It was quite a few photographs. [Walker] ended up sharing 30 with me and we put up 19 of them in the galleries,” says Martineau. The exhibition acknowledges the contributions of these creative partners – offering glimpses into the behind-the-scenes process and highlighting the interplay between photography, fashion, and art. “I think my job is to make a photograph that celebrates an aspect of humanity. It’s about making something that is a collaboration, something that is universally for the team, that people are proud of,” says Walker of the experience.

Cloud 9, 2018

For fashion photographers, a commission from a museum is welcomed as a valued gift, a chance to express themselves artistically with little boundaries. “I’m only truthful as a photographer when I’m doing a commission like this, because you’re not being told how to take a picture and I’m not telling the picture how to be,” shares Walker. “The picture just arrived.”