Tim Walker - Storyteller

Currently at Somerset House is Tim Walker - Storyteller, a show of dream-like fashion photography, using large-scale props in intricate settings. I am not normally a fan of fashion photography, of impossibly thin women in unfeasible clothes, but this is different. This show is like walking into someone else's inner imagination. The photos depict impossible situations, fairytale scenarios, horror story events. In a country house living room, a large doll is pushing through the door as a dishevelled woman helplessly tries to shut the door. A fighter plane takes off in smoke and dust, all within a high-ceilinged room complete with chandelier. A re-imagination of the Yellow Brick road, made from actual, rough yellow bricks rather than the golden variety of the movies, passes through a tinted countryside. A boy lies asleep in a swan-shaped boat, dreaming of rescue.
Entering the exhibition through a narrow door it is stunning to see the props used in the photos in the room, as if the picture has come to life: There is the spitfire bomber from the image, here crashed through the fireplace, tail-fin stuck out at a skewed angle. There the oversized doll lolls menacingly in the corner, looming over us like the vaguely scary skeleton in that doorway, a reflection of the photo where its bony arms awkwardly hug a woman in a red evening dress. On a podium a group of insects play classical instruments alongside the pictures of gowned women faintly menaced by those giant bees and dung beetles.
The photos show the use of the props, but it is the objects themselves, incongruously placed on the walls and set next to the photos, that create the disconcerting illusion that what we are seeing in the photos is real, that the dreams of spaceships manoeuvred through an English hunt by melancholy aliens, that Humpty Dumpty lying broken in a field as a panic-stricken woman looks on, that the oversized sketches pinned to the wall with plate-sized pins, the sand spilling from a photo of the desert across the floor of the gallery, are photojournalism of the strange kind, rather than a meticulously planned setup.
Walker describes the photographic process as a childish daydream: he walks up a hidden staircase into a black-clad room, a window in the far corner falling shut with a loud clap (like a camera shutter) as he looks out at an amazing view; a day dream he only occasionally has access to, to his deep regret.
Walking through the interlocking rooms of the show I am glad that the few times he has managed to walk into that dream, that room, he has come away with images of such strange beauty and mystery.