TIM WALKER...

I went to the Tim Walker exhibition at the Design Museum yesterday (I keep typing Time Walker - which seems apt for Mr Nostalgia). While I enjoyed seeing large scale prints of the colour saturated pictures we know so well from Vogue etc up close; I was more intrigued by the images that didn't feature lilac horses, pastel dyed cats or grand panelled rooms full of plants or tents or boats. Not that I don't like that stuff, quite the opposite, but perhaps because I am also English and it's a very concentrated distillation of hyper Englishness (apparently that's not a word) that I find interest in something else. I did love the quote though, from the owner of Eglingham Hall in Northumberland, where Tim's English Country House on acid world is often set. He happily grumbled that he can't get on with the work of running the estate because he's always too busy trying to suspend Lily Cole over a river or something. Getting back to the less colourful, lesser known, this one struck me particularly:

Iris Palmer and her suitcases (What happened to Iris Palmer by the way? Off to Google it.)

I've had this picture on my wall for years - torn out of Italian Vogue if I remember rightly. It's called Shona's Tree and leads me on to mentioning the importance of Shona Heath's work in creating the amazing sets that Tim Walker's camera records.

There was no sign in the exhibition about not taking photos and no one seemed to be enforcing the rule if there was one. Even so, I felt a little cheeky snapping away. You can see most of the photos here anyway - but I took a few snaps of his sketchbooks displayed under glass. I love looking at people's sketchbooks - there's something about them that's like a window into their mind, but then, at a glance every sketchbook is much the same - except Tim's are littered with callsheets for Vogue shoots in India:

The exhibition is on until 7 September 2008.

{All photos (c)Tim Walker (obviously).}