Tim Walker Unveils 'Fairyland' Queer Britain Exhibition — SkimNews
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- Tim Walker spent six years creating 'Fairyland: Love and Legends' for the National Portrait Gallery after discovering a plaque marking Britain's first gay rights demonstration on 27 November 1970 — the day he was born
- The exhibition features portraits of activists, artists and queer figures including Ted Brown, Lisa Power, Andrew Lumsden, Peter Tatchell, Lady Phyll, Sue Sanders, Ian McKellen, Troye Sivan, Chappell Roan, Russell T Davies and Marc Almond
- The AIDS history runs through the show: nurse Jane Bruton is photographed holding former patient Tony Whitehead, one of the first lives saved by combination therapy in 1996, alongside professor Jonathan Weber who helped develop the breakthrough
- Activist Graham McKerrow is depicted with a November 1982 copy of Capital Gay — co-founded with Michael Mason — whose splash read 'US disease hits London,' marking the first UK coverage of AIDS
- Walker's erotic photographs — including lesbian shots, S&M imagery and what he calls 'erotic landscapes' inspired by Fragonard's The Swing — were pushed into a separate 18-plus room by the National Portrait Gallery against his original plan to scatter them throughout
- The portraitist previously apprenticed under Richard Avedon in New York and has shot Rihanna (who arrived 11 hours late for a 2pm shoot), Kate Moss, Lady Gaga, Björk, Frank Ocean and a 2005 Madonna session at Ashcombe
Why it matters: By weaving Holbein-inspired formal portraits with AIDS-era artifacts and explicit erotic imagery, Walker uses the National Portrait Gallery's institutional weight to canonize queer British history that mainstream fashion photography typically ignores — a personal project made urgent by what Walker calls the decline of the glossy magazine era.
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