Step into the weird and wonderful world of Tim Walker

At a time when anyone in possession of an iPhone and an Instagram account sees themselves as a photographer, London-based image maker Tim Walker continues to take things to another vertiginous level. Time and time again he conjures up a whole world, turns it upside down and populates it with fairy tale figures, captive mermaids, kaleidoscopic acid trips on sunny afternoons, enchanted forests and couture. He doesn’t shoot photographs so much as construct images — each one crafted in conjunction with a tightly knit group of collaborators.

Susanna Brown, curator of the Tim Walker exhibit that opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London this month, says: “Some of Tim’s shoots are intimate affairs; others are enormously ambitious and complex, involving weeks of planning and the talents of myriad creative collaborators — from set designers and prop makers to stylists and hair and make-up artists. These individuals understand Tim’s particular brand of make-believe and magic.”

Don’t expect a straightforward retrospective of the fashion photographer’s work at the V&A, but do expect magic. There are plenty of well-known images from his 25-year career, but as befits the style that Walker has honed over the years, the show aims to immerse the visitor in a universe of fantasy. The exhibition has been designed by one of Walker’s most frequent collaborators, the set designer Shona Heath, and features 10 rooms housing a series of images inspired by objects Walker chose from the V&A archive. The first room riffs on a piece of stained glass from the early 16th century that inspired him to create a vibrant glowing red image dominated by a sculptural coat from Moncler. Another space has been furnished in fin de siècle green velvet, which gives way to an austere white studio where 10 photographs inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration are exhibited. This series offers a case study in how Walker and his team create an image.

“I worked with black card and cut out a series of elongated fake shadows the day before the shoot,” explains Heath. “Tim had already decided he wanted to use the curve of the white cove in the studio with a wide-angle lens to create a warped look, so I worked along those lines. We used a lot of black rope, and welded together thin metal shapes for filigree pieces that we suspended in the set.” The largely monochrome concept for the shoot dictated what fashion — selected by stylist Katy England — was going to appear in the images. And casting was crucial, explains Walker. “I used a dancer from Michael Clark’s company who I have made a film with, because I love the way he moves. We also shot model Anna Cleveland, who is incredibly elegant and who carries the genes of her mother Pat.”

The production on Walker’s work sets it apart from his contemporaries. He is one of the most successful fashion photographers of his generation and has shot everyone from Madonna to Tilda Swinton with an immediately recognisable style. You might say that Walker’s rise to fame came about through the vacuum created by David LaChapelle, one the most distinctive photographers of the 1990s, giving it up in the mid-2000s to retreat to Hawaii and become a farmer. But while LaChapelle was all about Baudrillardian pop bombast fed through a week’s worth of Photoshop filters, Walker’s brand of fantasy is more human. He shoots with predominantly natural daylight, and his fashion work is narrative — he creates a strong series of images that tell a story with each shoot.

Walker thrives on spontaneity as much as he does set design. “Often we will look at an outfit on set,” he explains, “and then me, Shona, the hair and make-up artists and the stylist will start throwing ideas around, and then you create instant lyrics and go out and start jamming. And it works or it doesn’t.” Heath illustrates his point with an observation from the Beardsley shoot: “Tim grabbed a cardboard cut-out I had done on set and positioned it in front of the camera so it looked like the model had the most amazing dress on. But it’s just a little piece of black card.”

Walker believes that for all the artifice present in his work, it’s his relaxed approach to shooting that lifts his imagery and gives it energy. “Photography needs to be on a very long lead,” he says. “Even though you are working within an artificial landscape, you’re looking for something genuine to happen within it. You need to keep things loose or the picture dies. I don’t go into a shoot with a fixed idea of the final image, but I know the mood.”

That mood is created predominantly in collaboration with his two regular set designers: Heath and Simon Costin. Which one depends on the story he is telling. “Each person I work with creates a different mood,” explains Walker. “They all bring a different chemistry to the set and it’s a question of the ingredients needed to create what you want.”

Heath and Costin have been an integral part of the Walker aesthetic for nearly 20 years. “I was first introduced to him [Walker] by my agent, Camilla Lowther,” says Costin, who created the sets for shoots with Julianne Moore, Lily Cole and Kristen McMenamy that will be on show at the V&A. “We immediately got on — we share a love of all things British, fairgrounds, moth-eaten country houses and the like.” Costin created the sets for Walker’s first Vogue Italia shoot, with model Camilla Rutherford. “Tim loved Lewis Carroll,” recalls Costin, “so we had Camilla passing through a series of mirrors, as in Alice Through the Looking Glass. There was no money so we combined bits and pieces from our houses and I cut holes into sheets of mirror Plexiglas, which poor Camilla had to force herself through.”

Walker continues to challenge both himself and his collaborators and is spurred on by clients with a hunger for ever more fantastical imagery. In 2017 he was commissioned by art collector Nicola Erni with a loose brief to create something personal, that he had always wanted to do, unshackled by commercial constraints and the demands of showcasing saleable fashion. The result was a five-day shoot with Heath in a house in the Northumberland countryside, with a corps of models and assistants, who worked on interpreting elements of Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, which Walker and Heath had gone to Madrid to study in detail. “We got every book we could on the painting,” says Walker. “We broke it down section by section. What Shona built was a response to that world.” Heath created the costumes as well as the sets for the series, “so it was double what I usually have to do,” she says. “I had five set guys and three assistants, and the sets were kept in a hay barn around the corner. There was a lot of driving along a muddy track in a tractor to ferry things back and forward. You can’t do these sorts of things without a team.”

And what happens to the sets created by Heath and Costin after each shoot? Some end up as part of a collection — the Bosch sets belong to the collector who commissioned that shoot. Some end up as donations to children’s scrap projects. But most are recycled and dismantled. “They have to die,” says Heath. “In some cases it’s sensitive, and we can’t have them appearing in another shoot. That aside, you need to remember that the sets are made to create a photograph, and they aren’t meant to last forever. They disintegrate. It’s the photograph that gives them the layer of magic.”

‘Tim Walker: Wonderful Things’, at the V&A from September 21 until March 8 vam.ac.uk

Follow @financialtimesfashion on Instagram to find out about our latest stories first. Listen and subscribe to Culture Call, a transatlantic conversation from the FT, at ft.com/culture-call or on Apple Podcasts