Tim Walker: Story Teller

The New York Times Book Review

Fashion photography has been dismissed as commercial, not creative. Unlike fine-art or documentary photography, which produce autonomous artistic creations, fashion photography has been perceived as functioning only to promote the sale of expensive commodities. Tim Walker's beautiful book will not answer the question "Is fashion art?" But it does demonstrate how the traditional high-low distinctions in visual culture are becoming blurred and, perhaps, increasingly irrelevant.
—Valerie Steele

Publishers Weekly

Famed fashion photographer Walker shares a new collection assembled from the world’s most famous magazines (including Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, the New Yorker, a follow-up to 2008’s Pictures timed to coincide with a major exhibition at Somerset House in London. Aided by an introduction by Robin Muir, foreword by Kate Bush, and Walker’s own afterword, these extravagantly choreographed, fantastical images never fail to deliver a jolt. They are usually disconcerting, and often have a downright wonderful sense of humor and play, as in a human windup doll. A holdout for shooting on film, Walker has an uncanny gift for stretching a moment and playing with time. This strength perhaps explains the cheeky dignity he lends his elderly subjects, whose portraits temper Walker’s usual archness with a welcome humanity. His images are stunningly vivid, sometimes over-bright in the manner of Avedon, whom Walker assisted. Many of his models wear facial expressions so flat and affect-free as to appear proxies for mannequins, suspended between worlds and struck hollow in the process. Like Avedon, Walker knows how to strip the human face of warmth to electrifying effect, and that tension between these macabre, morose faces and the comic elements in Walker’s visions gives the work its dynamism. This unresolved tension, always at the heart of Walker’s work, makes it perpetually thrilling. 170 color illus. (Nov.)