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Tim Walker

— I’m the sort of photographer who won’t ‘finish’ a picture until I’ve taken it as far as I can take it. Every picture I’ve done, these are the best ones obviously, but with every picture you have to force it to be the best picture it can be in the situation that you’re in.

 

As a photographer, I work on a scale. It is as if there is a sort of bell and some pictures will ring that bell louder than others. I think all the pictures in the Story Teller exhibition are pictures that have always instinctively been valuable to me for one reason or another. They really hit something personally for me. If someone else was going to curate a show of pictures I’ve taken in the last five years they might not choose these – but, for me, this is it. You couldn’t put a good show together unless you did it like that.

 

But we’ve been working on this for a long time and I think that it’s the portraiture and the idea of portraits in a white space that is interesting me the most now.

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Tim Walker

— I think that The Lost Explorer is all about film – moving film. As a photographer I think that the two meaningful books are Pictures and Story Teller. But then, as a filmmaker, there’s a totally different process because you’re working with a complete story. When you work as a photographer you’re working more with a mood and with a suggestion of something that enables the viewer to be able to put themselves in to the picture and imagine themselves in that situation: that’s what I think the human element in still photography is. With film you have to be a storyteller and not stray from the story; you have to be very, very specific – that’s what that film was about.

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Tim Walker

— That’s really important to me; so important. They’re all dreams: every picture is a fantasy. Not so much the portraiture, but the set pieces definitely are fantasies and I think that the model or the sitter in a picture is the window for the viewer – for any person – to be a part of that fantasy. It’s me asking them, inviting them, to enter into that, whether it’s a dark and sinister mood or a beautiful fairytale. It’s escapism – that’s what it is.

 

I’ve always had a very strong sense of entertainment and the need to entertain visually; I find a lot of photography, a lot of visual media, uninclusive because it’s not as obviously entertaining as these pictures are.

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Tim Walker

— You just can’t do that. A portrait that bears no truth about the sitter is irrelevant. When I’m commissioned to do a portrait of someone I do a lot of research about that person; who they are, what they represent, what I am attracted to about that person. With Monty Python, for example, it was always the sense of the clown that fascinated me, and so I entered into a very specific discussion with each of them to talk about that.

 

When you’re taking a portrait of someone you’re dabbling with their identity – it’s not like a fantasy – and I think that’s a very tender, vulnerable thing. It’s a fragile thing, you have to collaborate with that person. With Monty Python we sat down and talked with them about it and they all agreed that this was the most accurate portrait of them and where they were in their life, being burned out comedians. And we worked it out from there; we said “this is your stage” and the portraits are the result of how they then took that idea and gave something to the camera.

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Tim Walker

— I would never enforce something on a sitter in a portrait. The portrait of McQueen was one of the first that really taught me that: I had a very specific idea about him. Andy Hillman the London-based set designer] had made a bowtie out of bones and a skull that was meant to fit on his head so that he became sandwiched between a skull and crossbones. But he absolutely wouldn’t do that, he ripped off the bowtie and said, ‘I’m not doing that, but I love the skull and I love smoking.’ In a way that’s a gift because that photograph would be meaningless if he had just done what I’d told him to do – you wouldn’t learn anything about him. He lit up a cigarette, put a cigarette in the skull and put his finger in his mouth and gave that to the camera.

 

That picture then actually became more valuable because he died two weeks later. It becomes, in a way, a memento mori of a great talent. But even if he were still alive, you really feel his attitude.

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Tim Walker

— But you have to have that in portraiture or else it’s irrelevant. In every portrait there’s a story and a meaning that’s a mirror to that person just as much as there’s a mirror to me; I like skulls, I like the ideas in that photograph. It was a halfway meeting point. I think you come to that.

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Tim Walker

— Yes – the contradiction. I’ve always been interested in the idea of ‘the authentic’ and authentic beauty. I’ve tried to perpetuate the idea of something that’s more unusually beautiful. That’s been a very conscious decision of mine. I’ve always chosen to work with models who are considered beautiful women – but, say, when I first started to work with Stella Tennant], she was considered a supermodel but she looked like a boy; when I first worked with Karen Elson she was a redhead from Manchester that people described as an alien. Now Karen Elson is considered one of the great beauties of our time, and so is Stella. They hold an authenticity.

 

The fact that Kate Moss is the same height as you yet she came immediately after a wave of supermodels that were twice the size of you is such an amazing fight to me. I really respect that, and that’s what attracts me to her. Although she’s a proven beauty, it’s incredible that she’s survived. She’s saying to people, ‘I’m a waif from Croydon but I’m still beautiful,’ and now she’s considered the most beautiful woman in the world. Kristen McMenamy; Guinevere Van Seenus; all of these girls – for me they hold a type of beauty that is challenging a cliché.

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Tim Walker

— It’s a celebration of the individual. I find the vast majority of fashion is perpetuating something that has already been – particularly with how human beings are portrayed within it. I find it repetitive; I think I’ve always been drawn to something that’s a little more individual.

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Tim Walker

— Just by never compromising. Every picture in here is taken editorially; they’re all taken from magazines. I’m quite different from other photographers in that I will go to magazines with an idea and say, for example, ‘I’m really interested in the idea of insects in fairy tales, or in a narrative from a children’s book and I want to apply that to Kristen McMenamy in a shoot for LOVE magazine.’ That’s something I’ve always been very specific about, because I couldn’t photograph what I don’t believe in.

 

Sometimes people come to me and say something like, ‘We’d really love you to do a portrait of McQueen.’ Well, that’s interesting because he’s an interesting character and I can cope with that. But all the narratives are always coming from my point of view – they have to. It is intensely personal which is dangerous to play with. Just as much as the people you’re photographing are vulnerable,  I’m vulnerable too because I’m revealing something about myself.

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Tim Walker

— I think that that’s the whole point of photography. Traditionally fashion photography has been a very severe private world, and because I’ve had the experience of working with students who are interested in photography I’ve always wanted to open that up and to lay the cards on the table for them. Put it this way: if I’m photographing someone they’re putting their cards on the table and making themselves vulnerable and I think you have to meet them and be vulnerable too in terms of what you’re standing up for. And that’s alright when you’re working for magazines, because you do the shoots and they get published and people forget. But when you’re doing a show that’s wearing its heart on its sleeve like this one is you feel very vulnerable about it. But stuff it. Stuff it, you know?

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Tim Walker

— The purpose of the film room is that a lot of students don’t know what a model looks like when she moves: do they move robotically? Do they stay still? Am I capturing lots of pictures? It’s very important to me to reveal how a model, or how an actor or an actress, moves in front of the camera.

 

You’ve got someone like Tilda Swinton, and we’re in Iceland, outside in a freezing cold plain and she’s pretending to be the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz; I didn’t exhibit the picture because we didn’t have space, but if you look at how she’s moving she’s exactly being that character and for someone to see that in a still then they make that connection or they don’t. Just to see something that’s being frozen on a very grainy piece of Super 8 and to see something move; it’s a revelation.

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Tim Walker

— I find the word ‘art’ a little bit self-congratulatory and I find it uncomfortable: I’m a photographer. Art isn’t decided at the moment it’s made – a lot of people would disagree with me, but I think time decides what art is. The most unlikely things become art. For me to say, ‘This is art photography,’ I’m just not that sort of person; this is photography, this is me playing with a camera. Call it what you will but I would call it photography.

 

Everyone’s talking about things as art and I think time decides. So I can’t answer that – I think time answers that, or we’ll answer that in the passage of time. I think some photographers have become art, someone like Dianne Arbus, because time has passed and there’s an emotion she’s captured as a photographer. You can call her a photographer but you can also call her an artist. But she would never have called herself an artist. Avedon would never have called himself an artist.

 

Story Teller the book is out with Thames & Hudson, and Story Teller the exhibition is currently running in the East Wing Galleries of Somerset House.