Museum Treasures for the Photo Shoot

A fashion photographer gets inspiration from art, design objects and paintings. In short, Tim Walker snapped up Wonderful Things for his ten photo shoots - London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) invited him to the first nine courses, and the Getty Center in Los Angeles for dessert. The Getty will be presenting the results of the commissioned work in a subtly prepared manner from May 2.

The exhibition structure of Tim Walker: Wonderful Things is based on the ten photo sessions and is divided into ten sections. Visitors experience the new photo series as the centerpiece and at the same time get the chance to place it alongside museum objects, short films, and photographic sets in Walker's creative process. Both the V&A's and the Getty Center's respective sources of inspiration integrate into the exhibition's narrative structure - with fairy-tale titles announcing the sections' contents: Handle with Care, Why not be Oneself?, Pen and Ink, Illuminations, Lil' Dragon, The Land of the Living Men, Soldiers of Tomorrow, Cloud 9, Box of Delights, and Out of the Woods embed the exhibits in a thematic framework. Textiles, illustrations, paintings, and even a tapestry join Walker's artful photographs. Tim Walker: Wonderful Things runs through August 20.

Tim Walker was born in England in 1970 and began taking photographs as a child. After a year at the Cecil Beaton Archive in the Condé Nast Library in London, he studied photography at Exeter College of Art. In 1994, he started out as a freelance photographic assistant, first in the English capital and then in New York City. There he worked with fashion photographer Richard Avedon, among others. Walker photographed his first own story for British Vogue at the age of twenty-five.