1516 pb4 vanheeschv opdracht1 zonder snijtekens

The wonderful world

Fashion photographs

Walker loves the wonders of the world. Page 3

The Herald

He loves flowers in the spring Page 7

Tim Walker is photographer Page 4-5

Photography News

“All the news that fits” Volume 1 Number 3 April 2016

The white review Interview with Tim Walker

By Karl Smith

Collating the dramatic dreamscapes of Walker’s photographs

The transcendence of Walker’s work – which cannot be confined to, or labeled solely as a product of the fashion industry – is marked by its appreciation in the wider field of photographic arts. While it is true that the 42 year old Briton’s work has been featured more than that of any other photographer, almost month by month, in the pages of Vogue, there are also images from his portfolio hanging as permanent fixtures

at the Victoria & Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2008 he staged his first major solo exhibition, in conjunction with the publication of his first book Pictures, at The Design Museum and in 2009 received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York. Indeed, Walker’s work is more than the sum of its parts. Like the artist Mark Rothko, whose expansive canvases leave room for the Continued on back page

Tim Walker The world of Tim Walker Memories of childhood summers fade like a bruise.

The mark lingers down the years, a fuzzy, yellowing vision rendered in Instagram sepia. Sunlight warming closed eyelids. The sound of the breeze in the tall grass, a creased copy of The Wind In The Willows nearby, the pages fluttering. The smell of suncream, freshly cut grass and salt and vinegar. Afternoons stretching on and on for ever. Dreamtime.

“As adults, time is lost,” Tim Walker tells me. “We’re all so busy and everything is accelerated.

What a child has is a lot of time to wander and daydream. That’s what I did as a child.”

It’s what he still does. Walker is a photographer. He takes photographs of models and clothes for magazines such as Italian Vogue and W. Some of the most recent have been gathered together in a book called Tim Walker Story Teller.

Fashion Pictures

The beautiful clothes

I suppose you’d call them fashion pictures. But, really, they’re daydreams on paper. Summer fresh and storied. Photographs of a woman sitting in a biplane made of baguettes. Photographs of a UFO gliding over a country fence in the middle of a hunt. Photographs of country houses and beds and Spitfires and blow-up see-through sailing ships. They do what the best fashion photography does somewhere new.

“I love beautiful clothes,” admits Walker. “Clothing takes my breath away when it’s exquisite. But fashion is something that’s not my leading direction as a photographer. I don’t actually care for fashion, but I do care about beautiful clothes. And when you’re working for Vogue you see all these designers and then the stylist says, ‘What about this dress?’ And you go, ‘That really is a beautifully made dress.’

PHOTO BY TIM WALKER

I

’m not so motivated by fashion and brands,’ explains Tim Walker – one of the world’s leading fashion photographers. Given that Walker’s work is most frequently found between the glossy covers of high-end fashion magazines – Love, i-D and of course the myriad international imprints of Vogue, to name but a few – this statement makes for an interesting juxtaposition. The incongruence is only exacerbated in context of our meeting at Somerset House to mark the opening of his Mulberry-sponsored exhibition (and recently published book) Story Teller.

Collating the dramatic dreamscapes of Walker’s photographs, not just in the large format pictorial form to which photography is so often consigned in gallery spaces but rather in an immersive and tactile pseudo-reality enabled in part by the inclusion of the props and design that set them apart, Story Teller is Walker in microcosm: a bridge between two worlds.

Tim Walker Continued The world You don’t want to do anything else but photograph it. Fashion for me is just a massive dressing-up box.

There’s always something black, there’s always something baggy. In fashion there is always something you can mix together that becomes the costume in the play.”

Play is the word he comes back to again and again. Walker grew up in Dorset, part of a nuclear family (mother, father, brother), spent his childhood poring over the pages of Tintin books, and playing outdoors. The picture he paints of it is coloured in happiness.

You can see that childhood in his photographs, in their lightness, their sense of fun, their creamy, sun-dappled full fatness. “I think there are aspects of being a child that are too good to lose as you grow up. And I think that being a photographer allows me to still look at things with wonder. It’s a total high I get.”

Studio Right now Walker is sitting in his studio in “very inner city” London, looking out at six tower blocks.

But he’s talking about Maurice Sendak (whose In The Night Kitchen inspired that baguette plane) and the films of Powell and Pressburger and the photographs of Cecil Beaton; in short all the things that have informed his work. All actions have equal and opposite reactions. It’s not just a rule in science. You can see it at work in music and fashion.

Fashion photography too. If the nineties belonged to the grungey.

Photography News A montly newsletter of the Ficticious Community Editor: Ruth La Ferla Design: Victoria Lynn van Heesch Photography: Tim Walker Printing: Prints & Copy Printed on recycled paper

2

Photography News April 2016

Photography Fantasy Tim Walker is a listener, taking in conversational cues and stray bits of wisdom with a mind that whirs incessantly, much like the camera he carries wherever he goes. And that may be why, as he stood gazing seaward during a shoot last year on the northern coast of England, he was all ears when Kristen McMenamy, his model and muse, confided that she had long been enchanted by mermaids. She told Mr. Walker, as he recalled, “This is the one character I’ve never been able to play,” her wistful confession giving rise to a mutual, and mutually obsessive, fantasy.

At the time, the customarily flame-haired Ms. McMenamy wore a silver-gray mane — perfect, she decided, for her imagined role. “I’m not going to cut it until I’ve done the mermaid,” she told Mr. Walker playfully. “So you’d better make it work.”

Their shared vision eventually took shape in a series of eerily unsettling photographs that made their debut in the December/January issue of W. In the fashion portfolio, theoretically conceived to show off a selection of Vionnet dresses, Ms. McMenamy is

seen immersed in a giant fish tank; seated at a vanity, a pearl ring through her nose; or resting her tail fin on a homely brass bed.

That shoot was a high point in an annus mirabilis for the British photographer, 43.

With the publication of two books, a flurry of high-profile advertising campaigns and a film in progress, he is, as he tells it, only now hitting his stride.

The W shoot began haltingly, too sweet, or alternately too stilted, for his taste.

But eventually shooter and model found their rhythm, the experience one of several this year that taught him, he said, “to simply let go, to give in to the uncontrollable force that leads you to do your best work.” Struck by the fluidity of Ms. McMenamy’s gestures in and out of water, he accompanied his stills with some seven minutes of Super 8 footage, unveiling his mini-film during Art Basel in Miami Beach earlier his month. An expanded version, now in the editing stage, is the extension of Mr. Walker’s natural proclivities.

“His shoots, they don’t start with the clothes,” said Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W, who commissioned the photographs. “They start with an urgency for him to tell a story.”•

Photography Memories The memories

Memories of childhood summers fade like a bruise. The mark lingers down the years, a fuzzy, yellowing vision rendered in Instagram sepia. Sunlight warming closed eyelids. The sound of the breeze in the tall grass, a creased copy of The Wind In The Willows nearby, the pages fluttering. The smell of suncream, freshly cut grass and salt and vinegar. Afternoons stretching on and on for ever. Dreamtime. “As adults, time is lost,” Tim Walker tells me. “We’re all so busy and everything is accelerated. What a child has is a lot of time to wander and daydream. That’s what I did as a child.” It’s what he still does. Walker is a photographer. He takes photographs of models and clothes for magazines such as Italian Vogue and W. Some of the most recent have been gathered together in a book called Tim Walker Story Teller. You don’t want to do anything else but photograph it.

- Charlotte Jacobs Amsterdam

Lovely fashion

“I love beautiful clothes,” admits Walker.

“Clothing takes my breath away when it’s exquisite. But fashion is something that’s not my leading direction as a photographer. I don’t actually care for fashion, but I do care about beautiful clothes. And when you’re working for Vogue you see all these designers and then the stylist says, ‘What about this dress?’ And you go, ‘That really is a beautifully made dress.’ You don’t want to do anything else but photograph it. Fashion for me is just a massive dressing-up box.

There’s always something black, there’s always something baggy. In fashion there is always something you can mix together that becomes the costume in the play. Play is the word he comes back to again and again. Walker grew up in Dorset, part of a nuclear family (mother, father, brother), spent his childhood poring over the pages of Tintin books, and playing outdoors.

- Susan Meeuws New York

PHOTO BY TIM WALKER

“ I think that being a photographer allows me to still look at things with wonder.”

All actions have equal and opposite reactions. It’s not just a rule in science. You can see it at work in music and fashion.

The Wonderful World of Tim Walker The Herald, Scotland, October 2012

By Teddy Jamieson

M

emories of childhood summers fade like a bruise.The mark lingers down the years, a fuzzy, yellowing vision rendered in Instagram sepia. Sunlight warming closed eyelids.

The sound of the breeze in the tall grass, a creased copy of The Wind In The Willows nearby, the pages fluttering. The smell of suncream, freshly cut grass and salt and vinegar. Afternoons stretching on and on for ever. Dreamtime. “As adults, time is lost,” Tim Walker tells me. “We’re all so busy and everything is accelerated. What a child has is a lot of time to wander and daydream. That’s what I did as a child.”

It’s what he still does. Walker is a photographer. He takes photographs of models and clothes for magazines such as Italian Vogue and W. Some of the most recent have been gathered together in a book called Tim Walker Story Teller. I suppose you’d call them fashion pictures. But, really, they’re daydreams on paper. Summer fresh and storied.

Photographs of a woman sitting in a biplane made of baguettes. Photographs of a UFO gliding over a country fence in the middle of a hunt. Photographs of country houses and beds and Spitfires and blow-up see-through sailing ships. They do what the best fashion photography does – take you somewhere new.

“I love beautiful clothes,” admits Walker.

“Clothing takes my breath away when it’s exquisite. But fashion is something that’s not my leading direction as a photographer.

I don’t actually care for fashion, but I do care about beautiful clothes. And when you’re working for Vogue you see all these designers and then the stylist says, ‘What about this dress?’ And you go, ‘That really is a beautifully made dress.’ You don’t want to do anything else but photograph it. Fashion for me is just a massive dressing-up box. There’s always something black, there’s always something baggy. In fashion there is always something you can mix together that becomes the costume in the play.” Play is the word he comes back to again and again. Walker grew up in Dorset, part of a nuclear family (mother, father, brother), spent his childhood poring over the pages of Tintin books, and playing outdoors. The picture he paints of it is coloured in happiness. You can see that childhood in his photographs, in their lightness, their sense of fun, their creamy, sun-dappled full fatness. “I think there are aspects of being a child that are too good to lose as you grow up. And I think that being a photographer allows me to still look at things with wonder.

It’s a total high I get.”

Right now Walker is sitting in his studio in “very inner city” London, looking out at six tower blocks. But he’s talking about Maurice Sendak (whose In The Night Kitchen inspired that baguette plane) and the films of Powell and Pressburger and the photographs of Cecil Beaton; in short all the things that have informed his work. All

actions have equal and opposite reactions.

It’s not just a rule in science. You can see it at work in music and fashion. Fashion photography too. If the nineties belonged to the grungey images of Corinne Day (models with dirty fingernails), Walker came along around the millennium to reconfigure the form and returned it to a state of innocence. From bad romance to high romance if you like.

And his is a quintessentially British romance – romanticism might work better – at that. “I don’t go about being British,” he argues when I suggest as much. “It’s not an aim of mine. I recognise the word pantomime in my work and that’s an exclusively British thing, I think. But it would be a lie to say I thought about it. It just seeps out. The Tim Walker story goes something like this. Some time after he read Tintin he started reading fashion magazines in his late teens and was hooked. “I could see that fashion photography was probably the only way one could tell a story. The whole idea of a fantastical story had its place in fashion photography.

That was the only place you could do it. It allowed it. I used to look at fashion pictures and I thought, ‘Well, I really quite like that world.’” He borrowed his brother’s camera, a little snap camera, a Christmas present. But he didn’t think he could be a proper photographer because he struggled to get to grips with the technicalities. Still, he persevered.

He got himself an internship at Vogue House, looking through the archives. “I thought it was actually the dud job working in the dungeon of Conde Nast. • April 2016

Photography News 3

Flowers

Montly by Charlotte Jacobs

Born in England in 1970, Walker’s interest in photography began at the Condé Nast library in London where he worked on the Cecil Beaton archive for a year before university. After a three-year BA Honors degree in Photography at Exeter College of Art, Walker was awarded third prize as The Independent Young Photographer Of The Year.

PHOTO BY TIM WALKER

Tim Walker’s photographs have entranced the readers of Vogue, month by month, for over a decade. Extravagant staging and romantic motifs characterise his unmistakable style. After concentrating on photographic stills for 15 years, Walker is now also making moving film.

Upon graduation in 1994, Walker worked as a freelance photographic assistant in London before moving to New York City as a full time assistant to Richard Avedon.

When he returned to England, he initially concentrated on portrait and documentary work for British newspapers. At the age of 25 he shot his first fashion story for Vogue, and has photographed for the British, Italian, and American editions, as well as W Magazine and LOVE Magazine ever since.

Walker staged his first major exhibition at the Design Museum, London in 2008. This coincided with the publication of his book ‘Pictures’ published by teNeues.

In 2010 Walker’s first short film, ‘The Lost Explorer’ was premiered at Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and went on to win best short film at the Chicago United Film Festival, 2011.

4

Photography News April 2016

Tim Walker’s Thrilling Fashion Photographs Go on Show The Telegraph, September 2012 Penny Martin

W

ith its fairytale sets and arresting images, Tim Walker’s fashion photography is instantly recognisable. A new exhibition and book are set to celebrate his recent work. For the handful of elite fashion photographers who shoot the industry’s most high-profile advertising campaigns, October can mean only one thing: long days spent in airless studios with supermodels, photographing the spring/summer collections. Except for Tim Walker, that is, who is putting all his usual commitments on hold next month to take up residence in a neoclassical palace in London. As the subject of Somerset House’s forthcoming exhibition, Tim Walker: Story Teller, he will instead spend the next few weeks suspending a giant skeleton from the ceiling of the building’s barrel-vaulted galleries, installing a 12ft doll that has spooky, blinking eyes into the museum, and crashing a real Spitfire through its walls.

This might all sound like a jolly sabbatical from the business of making pictures that sell shoes and handbags, were it not for the fact that these props are exactly how Tim Walker sells shoes and handbags in his pictures.

Since Walker was first published in British Vogue in 1996, his work has moved further and further from the look and feel of mainstream fashion photography and the increasingly conservative path it has taken.

At the start of the last decade, when the substantial budgets required for shooting on location began to wane, many photographers turned to the photo-studio itself as subject matter for their cool, knowing fashion stills.

Yet Walker, 41, has always gone his own way. In search of something warmer, he unearthed the kind of mansion houses and charming country-side spots he recalled from his upbringing on the Devon-Dorset border as settings for his fantastical shoots. It was the beauty and specificity of these locations that made Walker’s pictures stand out, and earned him commissions from the industry’s

2012 saw the opening of Walker’s ‘Story Teller’ photographic exhibition at Somerset House, London.

The exhibition coincided with the publication of his book, ‘Story Teller’ published by Thames and Hudson. In a 2013 collaboration with Lawrence Mynott and Kit Hesketh-Harvey, he also released The Granny Alphabet, a unique collection of portraiture and illustration celebrating grandmothers.

Walker received the ‘Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator’ from The British Fashion Council in 2008 as well as the Infinity Award from The International Center of Photography in 2009. In 2012 Walker received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society.

most powerful magazines, US Vogue and Vogue Italia, to which he remains a regular contributor. Before going to Exeter to study photography, Walker spent a year working on the Cecil Beaton archive as an intern at the Condé Nast library. After completing his degree, he became a freelance assistant, then went to New York to work with Richard Avedon. When he returned to London in 1996, he concentrated on portraits and documentary photography for newspapers, but it was not long before he was being commissioned for Vogue .

Just as he was putting British fashion photography on the international map, he was also mapping Britishness on to his pictures, cramming them full of references to national folklore, social history, English literature and fairy tales. And central to this were the props, costumes and sets he devised with the set designers Simon Costin, Shona Heath, Andy Hillman and Rhea Thierstein.

‘It’s the set design of my work that interests me the most,’ Walker says now of the mesmerising scenarios they created together

- models emerging from the pages of magazines, livingroom interiors set up in the middle of fields, tents pitched inside country houses. It wasn’t the slick execution or verisimilitude of the sets that made Walker’s images work, rather the opposite: their obvious artifice and sense of whimsy that created a lightness and gentility. ‘The kind of theatrical photographs I take are so in danger of being kitsch and gimmicky,’ he says. ‘The performances are slightly hammy; it’s a dangerous line to tread. The sets are a way of bringing the picture back to something beautiful.’

Walker’s love of handicraft and the material aspects of image-making extends to the way he presents his photographs.

In 2008 he published Pictures, a book documenting his first 12 years of work. •

The Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London include Walker’s photographs in their permanent collections.

Tim lives in London.

Tim Walker’s photographs have entranced the readers of Vogue, month by month, for over a decade. Extravagant stagThis is a ing and romantic motifs characphotograph terise his unmistakable style. After with a lion concentrating on photographic and a girl. stills for 15 years, Walker is now also making moving film.

Born in England in 1970, Walker’s interest in photography began at the Condé Nast library in London where he worked on the Cecil Beaton archive for a year before university. After a three-year BA Honors degree in Photography at Exeter College of Art, Walker was awarded third prize as The Independent Young Photographer Of The Year. Upon graduation in 1994,

•

April 2016

Photography News 5

Photography Favorits

Each month we review the favorite photographs of the photographher of the month.

This month: Tim Walker. Photos by Tim Walker The harp In London ‘I’m not so motivated by fashion and brands,’ explains Tim Walker – one of the world’s leading fashion photographers.

Given that Walker’s work is most frequently found between the glossy covers of high-end fashion magazines – Love, i-D and of course the myriad international imprints of Vogue, to name but a few – this statement makes for an interesting juxtaposition. The incongruence is only exacerbated in context of our meeting at Somerset House to mark the opening of his Mulberry-sponsored exhibition (and recently published book) Story Teller. Collating the dramatic dreamscapes of Walker’s photographs, not just in the large format pictorial form to which photography is so often consigned in gallery spaces but rather in an immersive and tactile.

The woman with her elegant look

The toys

In Tokio

And, in that sense, Story Teller is a fitting collection: inclusive and representative of Walker’s extensive body of work and his own personality rather than reflective of the closed-off nature and widespread exclusivity of the fashion industry with which he finds himself partnered in a strange symbiosis. ‘I’m more interested in who’ll let me do what I want to do,’ he says. ‘I think that I’ve always used the fashion industry as a mechanism to fund and support my work; and if they let me and they’re happy then that’s fine.’ Walker himself is a charming and passionate man, eager to discuss his work and happy to go off topic if he senses something interesting. ‘Where do you want to start?’ QTHE WHITE REVIEW — With a back catalogue the size of yours, how do you go about choosing what goes in to an exhibition like Story Teller? ATIM WALKER —

The transcendence of Walker’s work – which cannot be confined to, or labeled solely as a product of the fashion industry – is marked by its appreciation in the wider field of photographic arts. While it is true that the 42 year old Briton’s work has been featured more than that of any other photographer, almost month by month, in the pages of Vogue, there are also images. From his portfolio hanging as permanent fixtures at the Victoria & Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London.

In 2008 he staged his first major solo exhibition, in conjunction with the publication of his first book Pictures, at The Design Museum and in 2009 received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York. Indeed, Walker’s work is more than the sum of its parts.

In Madrid

Photography Calender ✤✤2 August 2008 Pictures It’s about the great photographs Tim Walker made the last view years.

Design Museum, London.

10am-3pm, €10 ✤✤16 February 2009

Story Teller The pictures Tim Walker make are with a content and a story.

Somerset House, London.

6pm-11pm, €15

✤✤5 April 2010

Dreamscapes The story’s are about dreams off Tim Walker.

Bowes Museum, Durham UK. 7pm-10pm. Free

6

Photography News April 2016

✤✤18 October 2012 Wallpaper Tim Walker loves the motives of wallpaper.

Cochranen, Lauren.

11am-2pm, €20

✤✤31 January 2014 The Granny Alphabet Tim Walker loves Granny’s Lydia & Lola, New York.

8am-10pm, €15

✤✤30 October 2013 Wallpaper Tim Walker loves the motives of wallpaper.

Cochranen, Lauren.

11am-2pm, €20

✤✤13 September 2015 The Lost Toys Tim Walker loves his toys of his childhood.

He makes them bigger.

Fashion Art Museum, London.

5am-12pm, Free

✤✤6 January 2014 The Lost Explorer Tim Walker explore his own worlds in his imagination. He loves to build this images.

Thames & Hudson, London.

4am-10pm, €5

✤✤6 January 2014 British Fashion Council Tim Walker loves fashion photographis. He does something different with his fashion.

Photo museum, New York.

2am-10pm, €22

The lion

The movement

The girls

In Antwerp

In Barcelona

In Amsterdam

I’m the sort of photographer who won’t ‘finish’ a picture until I’ve taken it as far as I can take it. Every picture I’ve done, these are the best ones obviously, but with every picture you have to force it to be the best picture it can be in the situation that you’re in. As a photographer, I work on a scale. It is as if there is a sort of bell and some pictures will ring that bell louder than others. I think all the pictures in the Story Teller exhibition are pictures that have always instinctively been valuable to me for one reason or another. They really hit something personally for me. If someone else was going to curate a show of pictures I’ve taken in the last five years they might not choose these – but, for me, this is it.

You couldn’t put a good show together unless you did it like that.

But we’ve been working on this for a long time and I think that it’s the portraiture and the idea of portraits in a white space that is interesting me the most now. QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Your last book, The Lost Explorer, seems to have come from a different process. Do you consider that to be a more personal project?

ATIM WALKER — I think that The Lost Explorer is all about film – moving film. As a photographer I think that the two meaningful books are Pictures and Story Teller. But then, as a filmmaker, there’s a totally different process because you’re working with a complete story. When you work as a photographer you’re working more with a mood and with a suggestion of something that enables the viewer to be able to put themselves in to the picture and imagine themselves in that situation.

That’s what I think the human element in still photography is. With film you have to be a storyteller and not stray from the story; you have to be very, very specific – that’s what that film was about.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — In that way you’re quite a generous photographer – your work involves the viewer as much as it does the model, or even yourself. What role do you think the viewer plays in the production of an image? ATIM WALKER — That’s really important to me; so important.

They’re all dreams: every picture is a fantasy. Not so much the portraiture, but the set pieces definitely are fantasies and I think that the model or the sitter in a picture is the window for the viewer – for any person – to be a part of that fantasy. It’s me asking them, inviting them, to enter into that, whether it’s a dark and sinister mood or a beautiful fairytale.

Memories of childhood summers fade like a bruise. The mark lingers down the years, a fuzzy, yellowing vision rendered in Instagram sepia. Sunlight warming closed eyelids. The sound of the breeze in the tall grass, a creased copy of The Wind In The Willows nearby, the pages fluttering. The smell of suncream, freshly cut grass and salt and vinegar. Afternoons stretching on and on for ever.

Dreamtime.

“As adults, time is lost,” Tim Walker tells me. “We’re all so busy and everything is accelerated. What a child has is a lot of time to wander and daydream. That’s what I did as a child.” It’s what he still does.

Walker is a photographer. He takes photographs of models and clothes for magazines such as Italian Vogue and W. Some of the most recent have been gathered together in a book called Tim Walker Story Teller. I suppose you’d call them fashion pictures. But, really, they’re daydreams on paper. Summer fresh and storied. Photographs of a woman sitting in a biplane made of baguettes. Photographs of a UFO gliding over a country fence in the middle of a hunt.

Photographs of country houses and beds and Spitfires and blowup see-through sailing ships.

They do what the best fashion photography does – take you somewhere new.

PHOTO BY TIM WALKER

Photography World

The Wonderful World of Tim Walker. The Herald, Scotland.

“I love beautiful clothes,” admits Walker. “Clothing takes my breath away when it’s exquisite. But fashion is something that’s not my leading direction as a photographer. I don’t actually care for fashion, but I do care about beautiful clothes. And when you’re working for Vogue you see all these designers and then the stylist says, ‘What about this dress?’ And you go, ‘That really is a beautifully made dress.’ You don’t want to do anything else but photograph it. Fashion for me is just a massive dressing-up box. There’s always something black, there’s always something baggy. •

April 2016

Photography News 7

The white review Continued from page 1 viewer’s thoughts to fill, the photographer’s dreamlike fantasies are a world created not just for himself but for his audience.

And, in that sense, Story Teller is a fitting collection: inclusive and representative of Walker’s extensive body of work and his own personality rather than reflective of the closed-off nature and widespread exclusivity of the fashion industry with which he finds himself partnered in a strange symbiosis. ‘I’m more interested in who’ll let me do what I want to do,’ he says. ‘I think that I’ve always used the fashion industry as a mechanism to fund and support my work; and if they let me and they’re happy then that’s fine.’

Walker himself is a charming and passionate man, eager to discuss his work and happy to go off topic if he senses something interesting. ‘Where do you want to start?’

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — With a back catalogue the size of yours, how do you go about choosing what goes in to an exhibition like Story Teller?

ATIM WALKER — I’m the sort of photographer who won’t ‘finish’ a picture until I’ve taken it as far as I can take it. Every picture I’ve done, these are the best ones obviously, but with every picture you have to force it to be the best picture it can be in the situation that you’re in.

As a photographer, I work on a scale.

It is as if there is a sort of bell and some pictures will ring that bell louder than others. I

Photography News 56 Lange Nieuwstraat 2000 Antwerpen

Top: It’s about the movement that humans do when they are dancing Center: This picture is about the human puppet in our own body’s.

Bottom: The plastic womans are fighting with the plastic and themselves.

think all the pictures in the Story Teller exhibition are pictures that have always instinctively been valuable to me for one reason or another. They really hit something personally for me. If someone else was going to curate a show of pictures I’ve taken in the last five years they might not choose these – but, for me, this is it. You couldn’t put a good show together unless you did it like that.

But we’ve been working on this for a long time and I think that it’s the portraiture and the idea of portraits in a white space that is interesting me the most now.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Your last book, The Lost Explorer, seems to have come from a different process. Do you consider that to be a more personal project?

ATIM WALKER — I think that The Lost Explorer is all about film – moving film.

As a photographer I think that the two meaningful books are Pictures and Story Teller.

But then, as a filmmaker, there’s a totally different process because you’re working with a complete story. When you work as a photographer you’re working more with a mood and with a suggestion of something that enables the viewer to be able to put themselves in to the picture and imagine themselves in that situation: that’s what I think the human element in still photography is. With film you have to be a storyteller and not stray from the story; you have to be very, very specific – that’s what that film was about. •