Tailoring the British Landscape: Tim Walker’s Stage Designed Fashion Photographs

Overview & Synopsis

Tim Walker is known for his very British whimsical photo shoots for Vogue or Vanity Fair and his lack of interest in catwalks and studio pictures (although his curiosity for the latter has recently grown). Instead, he chooses to challenge indoors and outdoors settings in his fantastical mise en scenes—whether it is with a Bohemian dinner party suspended in trees, a giant Burtonian skeleton in a field of crimson roses, a flying saucer gliding along a fox hunt in the British countryside or a huge doll crashing through the woods in Northumberland. The open spaces of the British landscape from the West Country to Northumberland and further North to the Scottish Highlands are Walker’s playground, and when the land is not immediately there, trees, streams, ponds, glades or snow can be recreated artificially indoors. Walker unrestrainedly gives life to his visions and uses fashion photography as a tool to explore his dreams and fantasies. Working with natural light and props, the photographer reveals the British landscape in an improbable way in punctiliously crafted tableaux vivants with roots in Surrealism and the traditions of British landscape painting. As pretence is the creative spur that nourishes Walker’s pictures, a sense of longing for a lost England seems to pervade his pictures with Neo-romanticism. Drawing from recent approaches in cultural geography this paper will discuss Walker’s treatment of the British landscape as a social product, a palpable physical medium and an imaginary cultural representation, questioning the (re)making process of the British national identity.