Once Upon a Time, Tim Walker Decided to Photograph Everyone Who Deserved a Fairy Tale

You’re walking through a gallery and find Ian McKellen dressed as something out of a fairy tale standing beside a healthcare worker that has never been put on a gallery wall before. They’re both shot with the same reverence, the same theatrical light and the same total commitment to the idea that both of them deserve to be looked at this closely. That’s the premise of Fairyland: Love and Legends, opening at the National Portrait Gallery on 8 October, and it’s the biggest museum show Tim Walker has ever done.

Walker spent the last five years on this project, building out roughly 250 new portraits of LGBTQ+ artists, activists, performers and community organisers. He’s been mixing household names like Chappell Roan, Miriam Margolyes or filmmaker Isaac Julien, with people whose work has mostly happened outside the spotlight – drag performers, healthcare workers, grassroots activists. These are the people who hold queer communities together day to day, next to others who represent it on a red carpet. The whole exhibition draws on folklore and fantasy deliberately as visual languages have always been tools queer culture has used to reinvent itself and push back against being erased.

It’s a fitting subject for Walker specifically. He’s spent three decades building a reputation as fashion photography’s resident dreamer using fairy-tale sets and blowing things up to a theatrical scale. There’s also the sense that every shoot is secretly a short film, going back to when he apprenticed under Richard Avedon in New York and shot his first British Vogue story at just 25. This is his first major London show since the V&A’s Wonderful Things in 2019, and the move from high fashion to this feels like he’s finally pointing that same fantastical lens at something closer to home.

The exhibition’s curated by Susanna Brown, and comes with a companion book featuring new writing from Travis Alabanza, Russell T Davies, Shon Faye, Lisa Power and Joelle Taylor one of the strongest lineups of queer British writers you could put on one spine.

Fairyland: Love and Legends runs at the National Portrait Gallery from 8 October 2026 to 31 January 2027.