Tim Walker’s Fairyland: From Fashion Fantasy to Queer Portraiture
L-R: Ian McKellen, Love, London, 2023; Chappell Roan, Fashion: Chanel Haute Couture, New York City, 2025; Isaac Julien and Queen Conch Shell, London, 2023; Miriam Margolyes, Clapham Cream Teas, London, 2023; Lady Phyll, London, 2024; Kae Tempest, London, 2023; Francis Lee, Ode to Edward Carpenter, London, 2023; Shon Faye, London, 2025. © Tim Walker
(This story was updated October 7)
Tim Walker’s photography has long existed between fashion, theatre and fantasy. Since the 1990s, his images have combined couture, elaborate staging and constructed worlds to create portraits in which clothing and setting shape identity as much as the sitter.
Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends, at the National Portrait Gallery in London, carries that visual language into a new context: a portrait of queer lives, communities and histories.
The exhibition presents around 250 newly commissioned portraits developed over five years, bringing together activists, artists, performers, writers and public figures including Ian McKellen, Isaac Julien, Miriam Margolyes and Chappell Roan.
Rather than focusing on a single generation, Walker places figures from different moments of queer history within the same visual conversation.
L-R: Andrew Lumsden (1941–2023) (after Nicholas Hilliard), London, 2023; Olivette Cole–Wilson and Blackbird, London, 2025 ©Tim Walker
“This is an exhibition about one artist's queer life and career, and the myriad individuals who have inspired and enlightened him throughout that journey. This is also an exhibition about love in all its forms, and the power of connection between friends, chosen families, couples and communities. It reminds us what can be achieved when we work together,” said Susanna Brown, curator of the exhibition.
The curation begins with those who fought for visibility and rights from the 1970s onwards, including members of the Gay Liberation Front. Walker photographs these sitters using the conventions of sixteenth-century portraiture, drawing on the work of Hans Holbein the Younger and Nicholas Hilliard. A language once associated with power and status is redirected towards people whose influence was built through activism and community.
“Holbein and Hilliard memorialised movers and shakers of the Tudor aristocracy for hundreds of years to come. The trailblazers I photographed made history and deserved to be on our gallery walls too,” Walker said.
The project also returns to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, bringing together musicians, healthcare workers and campaigners whose work responded to the fear and discrimination of the period. Walker has described wanting to “bring that disco to the ward” — a phrase that captures the exhibition’s attempt to place cultural memory alongside political action.
Fashion runs through the rest of the show as directly as it ever has in Walker’s editorial work. Portraits of designers, performers and musicians treat clothing, makeup and transformation as the language people have used to claim visibility — not decoration, but a working tool of representation. A nod to the work of celebrated photographer Cecil Beaton can be seen in a section dedicated to camp, which has long been a queer code and practice. “A way of poking fun at that which is most serious to us. Camp delights and disgusts. It lends itself to a great picture. Its hollowness can surprise us with meaning. The artifice is the point,” Walker said.
Elsewhere in Fairyland, the portraits’ aesthetic against seamless white paper is reminiscent of the plain backdrops favoured by another Vogue photographer, Irving Penn, whom Walker assisted in the 1990s in New York. “At first glance, they might be described as a mirroring of his mentor. But look closer at those pictures, and you discover that combination of tenderness and puckishness that is unique to Tim,” Brown remarked.
Many of Walker’s sitters brought personal and symbolic items along with them to his studio, and these objects often add meaning to their portraits. Jane Cholmeley appears with the sign from Silver Moon Women’s Bookshop, while Isaac Julien holds the conch shell associated with his 1989 film Looking for Langston. These details connect individual portraits to the places, works and movements that shaped them.
Designed by Walker’s longtime collaborator Shona Heath, the exhibition moves between formal portraiture and staged imagery, concluding with works inspired by queer eroticism.
“The greatest thing I learned from the activists, storytellers and performers who make up Fairyland is how essential eroticism and humour are,” Walker said.
The exhibition positions those qualities alongside protest and activism, showing how queer culture has been shaped as much by creativity and performance as by political struggle.
Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends is on view at the National Portrait Gallery from 9 October 2026 to 7 February 2027.
Paul O’Grady and Julian Clary as the Glitter Queens with Harry Browse, Raw and Liam Elias as the Glitter Boys, London, 2022
