Tim Walker Hopes You See Yourself in “Fairyland,” His Love Letter to the Queer Community

Photographer Tim Walker is sitting in his airy East London studio, flipping through one of the many photo books of his fashion­ imagery. The pictures are quintessentially Walker: models frolicking through the English countryside in couture, sets reminiscent of Alice’s ­Adventures in Wonderland, and portraits made through his uniquely whimsical and theatrical lens. Yet he is looking at these photos as though seeing the work in an entirely new light. “I didn’t know back then, but I realize it now,” he says. “All of the fashion pictures I was making are so queer.” He turns the page and lands of a famous photograph of pastel-colored fluffy cats, shot for Italian Vogue. “Look at that,” he says, grinning. “So gay!” When Walker calls his images “gay,” he means it in both senses: “gay” as in playful, joyful, and exuberant—the old English definition—and gay” as in made through a queer gaze. The same can be said of the photographs in his landmark solo exhibition at Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, opening October 9. With more than 250 photographs, “Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends” has been six years in the making and is Walker’s outpouring of love to his LGBTQIA+ community and its allies.

“Ninety percent of the images for ‘Fairyland’ are new,” says Walker. There’s John Waters, whose home he visited in Baltimore; actor Ben Whishaw, depicted shirtless, with a band of rainbow light cast across his chest; and Aariana Rose Philip, the first transgender and­ physically disabled woman to be represented by a major modeling agency. The exhibition, designed by the set designer Shona Heath, Walker’s close collaborator, also features several celebrities Walker shot for W magazine, including Chappell Roan, Frank Ocean, and Lady Gaga. “It was important to have the sung and the unsung,” Walker says of who is included. He points out portraits of legendary DJ Jeffrey Hinton, musician Tom Rasmussen, and nightlife photographer Roxy Lee, all important figures in London’s underground scene. “We go to the National Portrait Gallery to see who the movers and shakers are, and these are the movers and shakers for me.”

“Fairyland” begins with a replica of a plaque commemorating ­ Britain’s first Gay Liberation Front demonstration, on November 27, 1970 (­coincidentally, the day Walker was born). From there, the first room celebrates many of those who marched that day: activists now in their 70s and 80s, photographed in the manner of Hans Holbein. It is a deliberate nod to the stately paintings one finds in the grand halls of the National Portrait Gallery—only here, instead of monarchs and aristocrats, the subjects are radicals and subversives. To walk the other rooms of the show is to pay homage to drag queens, literary stars, and designers (Stephen Jones and Jean Paul Gaultier, to name just two). “These people carry on them a kind of pixie dust; people brush past and want to have a bit of that,” says Walker.

That “Fairyland” took six years to complete is perhaps unsurprising. “Someone would recommend someone else, and you could just go on and on; it was like a never-ending Russian doll,” says Walker. There is the sheer scale of the project, featuring everything from a punk-inspired shoot with London’s 1980s Rebel Dykes to a ­sitting at the extravagantly camp home of British romance novelist Barbara Cartland. Then there is Walker’s process with his sitters, which is deliberately slow. Each portrait in “Fairyland” began with a letter and then a phone call, with Walker asking, “How do you want to be celebrated? Who are you?” Then came the wardrobe session, followed by the shoot, by which point a familiarity had developed. “The idea for the eraser in the John Waters photos came from ­ talking to him about being canceled; the toothpaste because Waters was obsessed with the Revlon smile and how people don’t smile like that anymore,” says Walker. This intimacy creates room for play. “People think photography must be very uptight and grand. But all the beautiful pictures we remember are playful gestures, joyful dances.”

Walker attributes this approach to his former teacher, ­ Richard Avedon, whom he began assisting in the mid-1990s. The job came after a spell in New York in which Walker wrote personal notes to photographers. “I didn’t have connections. I didn’t know ­ people from the art world—my mother is a cookbook writer,” he says. Working for Avedon was a baptism by fire: “It was hardcore; it was the army.” He worked seven-day weeks, early mornings and late nights. But from Avedon, Walker learned the art of simplicity—“Don’t let cables and flash and technicality get in the way; the picture is the person”—and how to access the psychology of his subject. He recalls the account of actor Fiona Shaw, photographed by Avedon and also featured in “Fairyland”: “Avedon took her out for dinner. They had a walk around Manhattan. He really wanted to understand who she was. Then they made the picture in 10 minutes.”

On reflection, Walker believes his approach differs from Avedon’s in one key way: “There was playfulness, but it was also so tense. I left that behind. I think I have more empathy. I’m more in love with the human race.” Especially for an exhibition on the LGBTQIA+ community, sensitivity was key. “I knew I’d be showing that picture to the person, and I wanted them to walk into the National Portrait Gallery and feel fabulous, powerful, and heard.”

He gives the example of E-J Scott, founder of the living archive the Museum of Transology. “E-J wanted to make a positive trans picture. He was talking about flowers and seeds, growing and beauty and nature, which reminded me of the phrase that another activist in the show, Helen Belcher, has written on her hand: ‘Nature loves diversity, society hates it.’ ” The first picture Walker took of Scott, with daffodils coming out of his pocket, didn’t feel quite right. “Then E-J wrapped himself up in Sellotape and said: ‘This is what I’ve experienced.’ That was E-J’s idea, the Sellotape; if I’d said it, it wouldn’t have worked.”

When Walker first conceived of the show, he asked himself whether a queer portrait show was even necessary. “At that point, the trans community hadn’t been quite so battered,” he says. Now, with hostility directed toward the trans community and an increasingly fraught public conversation around LGBTQIA+ rights, he sees the exhibition differently: “A lot of people have said, in this day and age, politically, that one of the U.K.’s biggest museums doing an out-and-out queer exhibition is pretty incredible—that a government establishment is doing this, and letting it be a celebration.”

Considering the show’s expansive vision of queerness, its title is therefore not only a reference to the worlds Walker builds or the magic of his sitters, but also a reclamation of the term “fairy,” often used as a slur. “I think I was a fairy as a little kid,” Walker says. “I would go into my mum’s jewelry box and go around the garden dancing, and rings would come off my fingers. It was very gay joy, and then I realized society hated that, so I hid it. This exhibition has made me realize I’m definitely in fairyland, that I always have been.”

The process has been rewarding but challenging. To capture portraits of AIDS activists was, in a way, to relive an era of fear, shame, and stigma; to photograph older queer people—as well as to buck fashion’s obsession with youth—was to reflect on aging himself. “Growing up, I had very little access to older gay couples. So when you go and see author and actor Alan Bennett and editor Rupert Thomas at home, how they live, it’s so beautiful—the difference in age, and how they’re so committed to each other,” says Walker. Or poet and playwright Maureen Duffy: “She was 94 when we photographed her. She had this army of friends there.” Overwhelmingly, what stood out from meeting an older generation was their use of humor as a weapon. “I would ask those activists at the first marches: ‘What was life like? Were you fighting? Were people abusing you?’ ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘but we laughed and we did it with humor.’ I think that is very powerful.”

In the future, Walker plans to divide his time between ­ London and England’s South Coast. He has aspirations to develop a photography school. “I think I need to put the camera down for a few years. This show is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’ve given it everything, but I have to take a break now. I need to stop taking pictures, because it’s become obsessive.”

“Fairyland,” in Walker’s absence, has been handed over to its audiences. What he hopes is that visitors will see themselves. “Even if they don’t know who any of these people are, a queer person needs to walk into this exhibition and recognize themselves in it— the nuance, the beauty, the creativity.” He returns to the original thought that has animated the project: the absence of queer role models, the years it took for him to embrace his inner fairy. “If I was 15 and saw these people on the walls,” he says, “I’d think, I want to be like them. That’s a good way to be.”

Lead image: Courtesy of Tim Walker.