Pastel kitties and antlered skulls: Tim Walker's photography

[tamaranth]

Yesterday I accompanied major_clanger to the Design Museum at Butlers Wharf, one of those places I've often been near but never been into.

By happy coincidence there was an exhibition of photography by Tim Walker, whose work I hadn't been aware of. He seems to do a lot of shoots for Vogue, but they're not typically fashion shoots: I didn't get a sense of the clothes being the focus. And the models are components of the pictures, elements, rather than there for the sake of who they are.

Many of the pictures struck me as quintessentially (and often eccentrically) English: a pack of hounds, with red-coated huntsman, in a light, empty room; a scene from (I think) Brief Encounter projected onto the outside of a Devon farmhouse, in green summer dusk, to a small group of children; top-hatted gentlemen with umbrellas, sitting down to dinner in a field in the rain. Other images are vividly exotic: a blue elephant against the rose-veiled walls of an Indian palace; painted tribesmen with (again) colourful umbrellas. Others are surreal or unsettling: a corps de ballet practicing in a high-ceiling hall adorned with a hundred or more antlered deer skulls; a motorbike in an elegant 18th-century ballroom that's strewn with painfully bright balloons; a girl caught on a giant fishhook.

[EDIT: click teensy pic-strip for larger version]
One of the notes in the exhibition quotes Walker as saying that he's very influenced by his childhood, by daydreams, by dressing up. There's a mythic -- no, a fairytale -- quality to a lot of the pictures. They feel like illustrations: I can imagine them accompanying stories by M John Harrison, J G Ballard, Angela Carter.

And Mr Walker is responsible for the pastel kitties of my new icon. (I don't know if they're photoshopped or dyed. Persians always look so sulky.) I do like an artist with a sense of humour.
apparently they're hand-tinted. I don't know how they kept the assistants' blood from dripping onto the cats ....

A few links:
- Telegraph article
- Exhibition page at Design Museum site
- Stern Fotographie gallery

Comments

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

I like your icon better than the original photo for some reason.

[ladymoonray.livejournal.com]

I agree with this. It seems less scary, and more fun, in the cropped version.

T, I do love these photos. I found the website earlier, and had a good poke around. The pink horse is something to behold. I'll bet there are loads of 10-year-olds eyeing up their white/grey ponies after seeing that one!

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Some of the photos didn't do much for me, but some really drew me in. (The poster I bought is the girl-on-spiral-staircase -- fourth in that nasty grainy pic-strip above. There are another 5 pictures, at least, that I'd happily have in my house. Seriously wondering whether to keep the calendar for next year or slice'n'frame now!)

Definitely worth a visit, though the admission fee is a steep £8.50.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

... fewer scary sullen pastel kitties?

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

That's probably it. ;)

I did have a look at the photographer's other work after I posted that comment and I like it a lot. I must make it to that exhibition.

[ladymoonray.livejournal.com]

I'd like to go, too. I don't think we're getting the full impact looking at the pics on the web.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

if you're going, I wouldn't mind coming along and having another look. Some of the pictures lose all their impact by being so small. And there are some that I can't find online at all.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/graphic/0,,2284917,00.html
hand-tinted pusscats!

[ajshepherd.livejournal.com]

There's a bit about the pastel Persians in the Guardian (http://arts.guardian.co.uk/graphic/0,,2284917,00.html) today.

"A lot of people get confused when they see this image. They think it was done by computer, but we actually took pigment powder, mixed it with talc to get the right ice-cream pastel colours, and brushed it into the cats."

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

oooh, thanks for that link!

I had a suspicion he was the sort of photographer who would do things the non-digital way. It's amazing -- you can't see any of the blood from the people who applied the pigment ...

[serennos.livejournal.com]

*snork* I thought that too! I imagine that the cats would have had to be washed afterwards (if the alternative was licking the talc off themselves), so there was probably blood sooner or later...

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Good grief - it had me fooled. There should be a special award for Blatantly Photoshopped Pictures That Actually Aren't.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

presumably the lilac horse and the blue elephant are done by hand too ... I bet the elephant took a while!

Shouldn't be a surprise. Anyone who builds huge scale models of cameras, gloves and fishhooks to photograph is probably not going to cheat with software. (I wouldn't be surprised if he uses real film.)

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Given the size that some of the pictures had been enlarged to, and the quality and detail of them, I'd say almost certainly so, quite probably medium format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_format_%28film%29).

For that matter, a lot of introductory photography courses require students to use black and white film in manual cameras, to get across the idea of properly focussing and exposing pictures rather than the 'take 50 shots and hope one comes out' approach that can be encouraged by digital.