Tim Walker is a contemporary fashion photographer leaving in London.

He has been shooting for the British, Italian and American editions of Vogue and many other fashion magazines.

He’s elaborated his own style which is based on surreal fantasies often inspired by fairy tales. The scenes of his shots are created in collaboration with his team of set builders, and stylists. In his opinion, designing sets are the most pleasurable part of creating a picture. His photographs are narrative and encourage a viewer to get to the dreamy Wonderland.

Tim Walker refers very often to Alice in Wonderland, perhaps his favourite sources of inspiration. It may be a kind of escapism, or return to childhood, as he once said: only as kids we have enough time to wander and daydream, what he was doing as a child.

 

This ‘eternal’ return to childhood and Alice in Wonderland finally came to a great sequence of shots for Pirelli Calendar. He decided to tell the story in a completely new way. Tim Walker says ‘Alice has been told so many times and I wanted to go back to the genesis of the imagination behind Lewis Carroll to tell it from the very beginning again. I wanted to find a different and original angle.’ The key to the new point of view was an all-black cast of celebs like Naomi Campbell, Whoopi Goldberg or Duckie Thot – the Sudanese-Australian model, also known as ‚Black Barbie’.

It seems to be an attempt to show the universality of the story by celebrating diversity.

However, as we can see in the picture above Tim Walker is still faithful to the idea of a return to childhood. The kid in this picture is a giant and seems yet to grow but doesn’t intend to leave the house of the past. It also tells us about the creative process which Tim Walker describes as imagining photography as ‘a secret room’ which you may find only when your ‘intentions are true’.