Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends
Tim Walker is a phenomenal fashion photographer. The 55-year-old has created iconic spread after iconic spread for the likes of British Vogue, i-D and Vanity Fair, and he’s shot famous faces including Tilda Swinton, Kate Moss and Harry Styles. Walker's surreal, Alice in Wonderland-inspired style is whimsical, always surprising, and somehow still cool. So then, why is the majority of this landmark show made up of boring celebrity portraits taken on plain grey backgrounds?
The premise of Fairyland: Love and Legends is simple: a celebration of queerness comprising 250 portraits, all shot by Walker, of LGBTQ+ activists, artists, actors, singers and allies, taken across six years. Walker got the idea for the exhibition when he stumbled across the plaque commemorating the first gay rights demonstration in Britain while walking in Highbury Fields. A replica of this triangular plaque is displayed proudly at the entrance to the exhibition.
Some of it is subversive and exciting
Fairyland opens with stronger works, in a room dedicated to gay rights campaigners of the ‘70s and ‘80s, all defiantly posing in portraits that mimic the style of Tudor painters Hans Holbein the Younger and Nicholas Hilliard. Olivette Cole-Wilson, a founding member of Stonewall, delicately holds a blackbird in jewellery-encrusted hands that are framed by a thick gilded frame. Musician and longtime supporter of the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard Tom Robinson smirks at the camera, holding a kestrel and...