It’s much more than a retrospective. The British photographer Tim Walker has delivered an entirely new body of works for his largest exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Titled Wonderful Things, it’s the result of a Walker’s year exploration and research at the Victoria & Albert Museum .
He also met curators and conservators and visited some of the museum’s underground passages looking for inspiration.
Despite Walker being well known for his work as a fashion photographer, clothing is secondary in this showcase. Indeed, the heart of this show is a series of 10 new shoots which take their inspiration from V&A’s items.
“Every shoot is a total love letter to an object from the V&A, sometimes several objects. My imagination went off in all sorts of directions and then I was really in love.It was a total firework display. It was a supernova of creative explosions that you want to get down”, the British photographer said about the exhibition, rather poetically
The show is divided into several rooms. The first one is a retrospective of his previous portraits, where you can discover Cate Blanchett, Kate Moss, Tilda Swinton and more, through Walker’s eyes, but also some of his nude portraits.
Then a second room called Illuminations with a kind of burned-out cathedral comprising renaissance treasures, as well as a 1745 snuffbox illustrated with a dragon featuring a fantasy history of a flower that only blooms at full moon, and much more.
As you can tell, the exhibition explores Walker’s wonderful world as the name suggests. Alongside the exhibition, Walker has produced two films to accompany the series of pictures, one of which came about from him asking his team to film a behind-the-scene footage of Tim taking the pictures on a Super 8 camera.
To conclude, some words from Walker, ‟in a world of uncertainty, the ability to escape it all is a truly wonderful thing“.
Tim Walker: Wonderful Things runs from this Saturday, September 21 to March 8, 2020. Tickets are available to purchase via the V&A website here.
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