Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends runs at the National Portrait Gallery from 9 October 2026 to 7 February 2027.
Tim Walker does not photograph people so much as build worlds and then put people in them. He came up through fashion photography in the 1990s, has shot for the magazines for thirty years, and has always worked with sets rather than locations: giant props built full size, a swan the size of a car, a bedroom filled with soap bubbles, colour pushed until it stops being documentary. He is one of very few fashion photographers whose pictures survive being taken out of the magazine they were made for, and museums keep giving him rooms accordingly.
Fairyland: Love and Legends is about exactly what the title says — the English tradition of fairy painting and folklore, and what a photographer who builds rather than finds can do with it. His last museum show, at the V&A in 2019, sent him into the collection to find things to photograph and produced ten new series from it. That is the method he brings to any archive he is given.
The National Portrait Gallery gives him its main temporary space from Friday 9 October 2026 to Sunday 7 February 2027, four months. Tickets are not yet on sale. It opens a month after the Gallery’s Marilyn Monroe show closes and runs through the whole winter, which is the Gallery pairing the most photographed woman of the twentieth century with a photographer who has never been interested in documenting anyone.