His photographs are famed for giant sets and fairytale fantasies, so why is Tim Walker shooting portraits on plain white backgrounds?

If you don’t know much about fashion photography, you might assume it’s relatively straightforward stuff: dress a model, pose a model, shoot a model. A quick flick through the pages of a modern fashion magazine though, and you’ll be swiftly disabused of that notion. At the high end of the market, a contemporary fashion shoot is more like fine art, and there’s no finer exponent than British photographer Tim Walker.

Known for his outsized props, elaborate sets and scenes that look like they’ve escaped from a children’s picture book, he’s spend the last three decades filling the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, W and i-D with epic, thrilling and outlandish images. So when I first glimpsed some of the press images for his latest exhibition – a series of standard-looking portraits shot against plain white backgrounds – I assumed I’d opened the wrong folder on my computer.

But there was no mistake. Walker is going in a very different direction here.

50 years of activism

Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends at London’s National Portrait Gallery brings together 250 new portraits celebrating “over 50 years of Queer activism, community and love”, with subjects range from little-known activists and nurses to actors such as Ian McKellen, Ncuti Gatwa and Ben Wishaw and musicians including Lady Gaga, Kay Tempest and Chappell Roan.

The stark look of many of these portraits was a deliberate choice: Walker assisted Richard Avedon in New York in the 1990s, and the press materials describe the white backdrops here as a nod to his old boss. But ultimately, a successful portrait is not about the background, it’s about the sitter. And across this collection, Walker demonstrates his usual ability to bring out a unique element of their personality.

Walker asked some of the sitters to bring an object that meant something to them. Author Jane Cholmeley brought the original shop sign from Silver Moon Women’s Bookshop, founded in 1984. Filmmaker Isaac Julien holds a conch shell, a motif from his 1989 film Looking for Langston. And photographer Sunil Gupta, naturally enough brought his camera; by the look of it, a Leica rangefinder.

Walker’s portrait of Ian McKellen, titled Love, goes further, with a tangle of hands forming the letters of the word in front of him.

Kitsch in sync

If you’re a fan of the epic and fantastical, though, don’t fret; that’s also represented in the exhibition, which was designed by Shona Heath; a longtime collaborator of Walker who won both a BAFTA and an Oscar for her production design on the 2023 movie Poor Things.

The show opens with portraits of founding members of the Gay Liberation Front and Stonewall, styled after the Tudor portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger and Nicholas Hilliard; Walker calls them his “queeristocracy”.

A central room, meanwhile, is given over to large-scale portraits of the post-punk collective the Rebel Dykes, inspired by Karlheinz Weinberger’s photographs of 1960s biker gangs. One shows four women in leather jackets and towering beehives, sitting on chairs in a field. The word “peak kitsch” comes gloriously to mind.

The second half of the show turns to fashion and performance, including a rococo tableau of two British comedians – Julian Clary and the late Paul O’Grady and – as the Glitter Queens, and actor Ben Whishaw lit by a vertical stripe of rainbow light from a prism. It all closes with a room of staged erotic scenes that subvert fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

Coming full circle

Walker was born on 27 November 1970, the same day as Britain’s first gay rights protest on Highbury Fields, and he sees the show as a full circle moment. “Just as I learned from the queer artists who came before me, some of whom I’m lucky enough to have met and photographed here, Fairyland is me saying you are not alone,” he says. “I want visitors to the exhibition to remember that your difference is your power.”

Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends runs from 9 October to 7 February on the ground floor of the National Portrait Gallery, and members can enter for free. The show is accompanied by a 320-page catalogue (£35), which includes an extended interview between Walker and Brown, plus essays by Travis Alabanza, Russell T Davies, Shon Faye, Lisa Power and Joelle Taylor.