Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Celebrating Queer Narratives

 

 

The very first thing to grasp in regards to the scale of this exhibition is that Tim Walker has spent 5 years on this mission. Fairyland: Love and Legends, operating till 7 February 2027, is a brand new physique of photographic works, 250 specifically created portraits of Queer individuals and their allies, constructed by way of half a decade of sustained engagement with a neighborhood the photographer has described as his personal.

Walker got here to prominence within the Nineties with a specific type of fantastical, elaborately staged pictures that grew to become synonymous with a sure pressure of high-fashion image-making. His work appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, i-D and elsewhere, and he printed seven books and confirmed internationally. The work in Fairyland represents one thing totally different, a decisive shift in focus and intention. The trend context falls away. What replaces it’s one thing extra direct and, in locations, extra plainly transferring.

The exhibition is curated by Susanna Brown and designed by Walker’s longtime collaborator Shona Heath. It opens with portraits of people that spent the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties advocating for the suitable to like, founding members of the Gay Liberation Front and Stonewall amongst them, together with Olivette Cole-Wilson, Andrew Lumsden, Lisa Power and Tom Robinson. Walker has described this part as his personal queeristocracy, photographed in a method drawn from sixteenth-century Tudor portraiture, particularly the formal intimacy of Holbein the Younger and Nicholas Hilliard. The historic gallery setting on the NPG isn’t incidental to this resolution. Placing these figures inside a practice of portraiture that has lengthy excluded them is itself an argument.

Each sitter was invited to carry a significant object to their sitting. Author Jane Cholmeley holds the unique store signal from Silver Moon Women’s Bookshop, based in 1984. Photographer Sunil Gupta holds his digicam. Filmmaker Isaac Julien holds a conch shell, a motif from his 1989 movie Looking for Langston. These will not be props chosen for visible impact. They are proof of lives and histories. The portraits of activists and changemakers, together with Peter Tatchell, Caroline Paige, Ted Brown and Gilli Salvat, are set in opposition to deceptively easy white backgrounds, a nod to Richard Avedon, with whom Walker labored as an assistant within the Nineties. The restraint is deliberate and efficient.

A big part of the exhibition addresses the HIV/AIDS disaster of the Eighties, the individuals who died, the healthcare staff and nurses who developed remedies, and the musicians whose work soundtracked that interval of concern and loss and solidarity. Marc Almond, Holly Johnson and Jimmy Somerville are amongst these photographed. Walker has spoken about eager to carry the disco to the ward, to honour the tireless work of those that pushed for correct care whereas additionally celebrating the defiance of the music made below these situations.

At the centre of the exhibition is a room of large-scale portraits of the Rebel Dykes, the post-punk collective whose campaigns spanned nuclear disarmament, environmentalism, sex-positive feminism and HIV solidarity. These pictures take Karlheinz Weinberger’s photographs of Sixties biker gangs as a visible reference. A brief movie accompanies them wherein the ladies replicate on neighborhood and activism.

The second half of the present strikes into trend, efficiency and transformation, the territories the place Queer tradition has lengthy completed a few of its most important work. Portraits embody designers Jean Paul Gaultier and Michaela Stark, drag performers Paul O’Grady, David Hoyle and Midgitte Bardot, actors Ncuti Gatwa, Hunter Schafer, Fiona Shaw and Ben Whishaw, and musicians together with Björk, Lady Gaga, Boy George, Frank Ocean and Chappell Roan. The exhibition ends with a room of staged erotic scenes that rework fairy tales and nursery rhymes by way of a Queer lens. Walker has stated that the best factor he discovered from the activists, storytellers and performers he photographed is how important eroticism and humour are to the topic. Not ornamental parts however central ones.

The exhibition spans simply over fifty years of Queer activism, neighborhood and love in Britain and past. Walker has described it as inserting himself within the Queer realm with confidence and as telling guests that their distinction is their energy. The curatorial ambition and the private funding are each evident within the mission’s scope.

A e book accompanies the exhibition with contributions from Travis Alabanza, Susanna Brown, Russell T Davies, Shon Faye, Lisa Power and Joelle Taylor.

Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends is on the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 9 October 2026 to 7 February 2027.

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