Story teller

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Tim Walker is one of the most visually exciting photographers of our time. This book showcases many of his most dazzling images - 'his daydreams turned into photographs', dating from around the last seven years of his career. Some of the biggest names in fashion and contemporary culture are here: Alber Elbaz sporting a pair of rabbit ears; Agyness Deyn in the sand dunes of Namibia; Alexander McQueen and a memento mori of skull and cigarettes; Helena Bonham Carter poised with Ray-Bans and a Diet Coke; Stella Tennant in a pink cloud among the rhododendrons of an English country garden... The singer and musician Kate Bush contributes a foreword and Walker himself an afterword, as well as illuminating his pictures throughout with personal observations. This exceptional and beautifully designed overview of a career caught in mid-flow reveals just how much one man's singular vision has influenced contemporary tastes in fashion, beauty, glamour and portraiture.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Famed fashion photographer Walker shares a new collection assembled from the world's most famous magazines (including Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, the New Yorker, a follow-up to 2008's Pictures timed to coincide with a major exhibition at Somerset House in London. Aided by an introduction by Robin Muir, foreword by Kate Bush, and Walker's own afterword, these extravagantly choreographed, fantastical images never fail to deliver a jolt. They are usually disconcerting, and often have a downright wonderful sense of humor and play, as in a human windup doll. A holdout for shooting on film, Walker has an uncanny gift for stretching a moment and playing with time. This strength perhaps explains the cheeky dignity he lends his elderly subjects, whose portraits temper Walker's usual archness with a welcome humanity. His images are stunningly vivid, sometimes over-bright in the manner of Avedon, whom Walker assisted. Many of his models wear facial expressions so flat and affect-free as to appear proxies for mannequins, suspended between worlds and struck hollow in the process. Like Avedon, Walker knows how to strip the human face of warmth to electrifying effect, and that tension between these macabre, morose faces and the comic elements in Walker's visions gives the work its dynamism. This unresolved tension, always at the heart of Walker's work, makes it perpetually thrilling. 170 color illus. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.