Tim Walker: adventures in wonderland
The photographer Tim Walker brings the imagination and beauty of Beaton and Parkinson to the pages of Vogue, albeit with a modern flavour. Robin Muir admires his fantasy landscapes, on show as part of a major retrospective at the Design Museum
At Vogue it all used to be so simple. When Tony Armstrong-Jones, as Lord Snowdon then was, went to the United States in 1958 at the dawn of jet-age travel, the fashion editor took 'me, a trunk of clothes and one model, Pagan Grigg. She did her own make-up and if we needed a man, her fiancé obliged. Not much fuss, really…'
Half a century on, this is Tim Walker's checklist for a Christmas shoot in Essex: 20 ballerinas, 17 'mirrored' geese, 250 ostrich eggs (sprayed gold), a box of giant plastic hands, a room full of white umbrellas, 20 Christmas trees, a wolf's head-and-feet costume, a giant pumpkin, fake silver armour, a horse (also sprayed gold), hundreds of 'Arabian Nights' oil lamps, and racks of dresses, costumes and ballerina tutus.
'And lots of rabbits from Norfolk,' Sophie Baudrand, Vogue's fashion-budget supremo, recalls, 'special ones that didn't fornicate, supposedly…' In addition, Vogue bought a vintage Rolls-Royce - cheaper than risking damaging a hired one in a field. 'Fashion Pantomime' was one of Vogue's most expensive few days outdoors. 'I think I've mostly blocked it out,' Baudrand, good fairy to Walker's spendthrift pixie, says.
Though Tim Walker's shoots can be operatic in scale and ambition, matching an unrestrained imagination with a collection of preparatory sketches, it pays off. Not since Beaton in the 1930s or Parkinson in the 1950s have Vogue's pages sung so loudly. It is unlikely that any other fashion photographer would base a depiction of the season's couture on the disquieting children's book The Adventures of the Two Dutch Dolls (1895).
Walker, 37, loves, he says, turning 'funny daydreams into funny photographs,' adding that he lives much of the time 'in an imaginary world', a world rooted in real-life and memory, specifically the British countryside of his childhood: the manicured landscape of Surrey and the wilder downlands of Sussex and Dorset. He admits to a subscription to Country Life and 'a very happy childhood'. His days at Exeter Art College were happy, too, spent making for the camera 'crowns out of wheat and going round junk shops and making things in the kitchen. I liked to walk through the countryside with a camera and photograph the people I knew. When I had a camera there was always a reason to go somewhere.'
He had a few false starts. A work placement in Vogue's library found him cataloguing Beaton's negatives, the model of how not to catalogue a photographer's negatives, it must be said. But it allowed Walker to discover Beaton. An apprenticeship with Richard Avedon in New York reinforced an affection for the English landscape that grew more idealised the longer he stayed away. Avedon taught him a mantra he swears by: 'Rattle through it. Never think too much. Explain later.'
'I wasn't the best assistant,' he admits. In New York, all he really had to do was open up the studio, empty its waste-paper baskets and close it up at night. Invariably, hours later, Avedon would appear in his pyjamas clutching a baseball bat and crying out, 'Who's there? Who's there?' - the night air rent by the wail of another mis-set alarm.
But Walker's fate was probably sealed by another incident. Latterly, Avedon would sit cross-legged on the floor to direct his photographs, and regularly needed someone to hoist him up. Once - just once - Walker was in the line of fire: 'I pulled him up but then, for some reason, I let go too early and dropped him.' Avedon went 'ape****. In front of 40 people.' And back to England went Walker.
More than a decade later, Walker is celebrating with a retrospective at the Design Museum and book that he has painstakingly put together as a portfolio of his work. He follows in the line of the great Vogue masters; hopefully Avedon, Parkinson and Beaton would have recognised a kindred spirit and applauded the colour, the life and the fantasy brought once again to fashion photography.
'Tim Walker Pictures' in association with Jigsaw is at the Design Museum until September 7 (designmuseum.org). 'Pictures by Tim Walker' (teNeues) is available from Telegraph Books for £63 plus £1.25 p&p (0870-428 4112). A further selection will appear in next week's magazine
so dreamy...
