Tim Walker. Vol.2.

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…'


Lily Cole and the giant watering can, Eglingham Hall, Northumberland, England, 2004, Italian Vogue. Every photographer needs the firm hand of their agent to bring them down occasionally, crashing back into the real world of budgets and feasibility. Andrew Thomas is not one of those agents: 'Every season there comes a conversation with Tim on his ideas for upcoming stories. Tim is going to suspend a model on a giant hook; float a bathroom in the sea; paint various animals in pastel shades; attach a bed to the top of a classic car and then drive it; a roomful of rabbits; a tree in a house; a horse in a house. Then it dawns on you: how on earth is all of this going to be accomplished? Eventually, somehow, it all comes to fruition.'

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).

  
'Vogue Pantomime'
Page from scrapbook 'Vogue Pantomime', 2004, British Vogue. The fashion editor Kate Phelan recalled that she 'went by the rule that anything went as long as it had a theatrical twist. I was free to go mad. This was not the shoot for the Little Black Dress.' There was little chance of that, Vogue agreed: 'Next to the clothes rails sat a grinning Cheshire cat, a wolf’s head, a giant squishy pumpkin, bags of wigs from the BBC costume department, fake silver armour, hats from the milliner Stephen Jones's archives and 20 tulle ballerina skirts.'

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.
 
Sacha Pivovarova, Kizhi, Russia, 2006, British Vogue. Michelle Duguid, assistant on the shoot: 'Four generations of a family lived in this cramped house. We ended up unpacking the clothes in a room where four of the oldest members of the family slept, while Tim set up his tripod in an adjoining room surrounded by a further 17 staring members of the extended family. The two sisters sang us old Russian folk songs about the death of traditional country life, a subject close to our hosts' hearts. The singing moved Sacha to tears.' Here she is interrupted as she puts on a lace communion dress by Chanel.

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 'apeshit. 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.

 























    

 

         













































 



 

 

    







                    

 

A Little Brit Different
    Meet Garech Browne, the Guinness heir whose father raised pigs in their drawing room. And Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. Tim Walker captures a cross section of proud standard-bearers in Britain’s long tradition of eccentricity. Related article: In “England Made Them,” Christopher Hitchens explains why his native land often seems like one big Monty Python skit.


Otis Ferry poses, in pinks, with foxhounds at the keeper’s cottage in the village of Eaton Mascott. He is master of the hounds for the village, and a critic of Britain’s ban on foxhunting.
 
Model, artist, and former trapeze performer Iris Palmer at Mill Hill Farm, in Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire.

Actor John Hurt—known for his eccentric roles, such as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant—in Bloomsbury.

The members of Clinic, a Liverpool band, who never reveal their faces, at Eglingham Hall Farm, in Northumberland.

Lady Isabella Cawdor with three of her four children, Eleanor, Jean, and James, at Carnoch, Invernesshire, in the Scottish Highlands.

Vivienne Westwood, unconventional fashion designer, in the old Camden Palace, in London

Guinness heir Garech Browne at Luggala, the family estate in County Wicklow, Ireland, where he has put white sand around his black lake so that it resembles a glass of Guinness.

Nomadic Jaguars in the Cheviot Walk, Northumberland.

Artist Peter Armstrong at his Brixton flat, which is wallpapered with clippings from newspapers and magazines.

Model and Devonshire descendant Stella Tennant poses in homage to her great-uncle Stephen Tennant (a lover of poet Siegfried Sassoon’s).

The Marquis of Bath, with crocodile, at his estate, in Longleat, Wiltshire.

Snowfall in the summer at Eglingham Hall, in Northumberland, owned by the Bewicke family.

An homage to Banksy, the political graffiti artist whose face remains unknown, in Chipping Norton, Oxon.

Charlie the Penguin stands among portraits of the Marquis of Bath at Longleat, his Wiltshire estate.

Artist Grayson Perry—here in West London—wore a crinoline dress to accept the 2003 Turner Prize, which he won for his pottery; he and his wife, psychotherapist Philippa Fairclough, have one daughter.