Exhibitions

Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends

London, United Kingdom

A fairyland for the ones who were never meant to fit inside the old stories. Tim Walker turns queer identity, love, fantasy and community into a world of radical beauty.

Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends

Meet the artist

Tim Walker

The Movement

Contemporary photography, Fashion

ArtLovers Tip

Enter Fairyland as if you were entering a new mythology. Don’t ask whether the portraits are “realistic.” Ask what kind of freedom they create. The magic of Tim Walker is that fantasy becomes more than decoration — it becomes a way for people to be seen with wonder, power and love.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

Contemporary portrait photography, fashion photography, staged photography, fantasy, theatrical image-making and queer visual culture.

Walker became known in the 1990s for a dreamlike photographic language shaped by fairytales, fashion, theatre and imagination. His work has appeared in magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, LOVE, Another Man and i-D.

Tim Walker’s Fairyland is a new photographic journey into queer identity, community and love. For this exhibition, Walker has spent five years photographing activists, performers, artists and writers, creating a body of work that turns portraiture into myth, stage and celebration.

You’re watching:

  • Queer trailblazers photographed through Walker’s fantastical visual world
  • Portraits that feel like legends, dreams or alternative fairytales
  • Exuberant costumes, theatrical settings and imagined landscapes
  • A space where identity is not explained, but celebrated
  • Photography as world-building: a place where people can appear as fully, beautifully themselves

The result feels less like a traditional portrait show and more like entering an emotional universe — one built from love, imagination, visibility and freedom.

Worth the trip

Yes — especially if you love photography that blends fashion, fantasy and identity.

This exhibition matters because it uses the language of fairytale not to escape reality, but to remake it. Walker’s Fairyland gives queer lives a visual mythology: not marginal, not hidden, not reduced to struggle — but luminous, powerful, playful and loved.

At the National Portrait Gallery, a museum dedicated to who gets represented and remembered, this exhibition feels especially meaningful. It asks what a portrait can do when it doesn’t just record a person, but gives them a world to inhabit.

How to experience it

Don’t look only at the styling — look at how fantasy creates dignity and freedom.

Notice how each portrait turns identity into atmosphere, not just appearance.

Pay attention to costume, gesture, landscape and colour as emotional language.

Think about fairytales: who was included, who was erased, and who gets to rewrite them now.

Let the exhibition feel joyful without making it superficial — joy here is a form of resistance.

London, United Kingdom

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