Tim Walker's Fairyland Opens at the National Portrait Gallery

Tim Walker has spent six years building Fairyland: Love and Legends, and it opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London with a lavender wall, a giant sculpted hand and a photograph of the artist aged five. The show runs until 7 February 2027. The boy in that opening image wears fairy wings. It was taken in 1975 by his mother, Lorna.

Curator Susanna Brown pushed for it to open the exhibition. "When Tim showed it to me last year I said, 'We need to open the exhibition with that because it sets the scene for the whole project'," she said.

What does Walker mean by Fairyland?

Walker, born 27 November 1970, writes in his introduction that he was "born happily gay". He invented Fairyland as a child refuge after learning that "society said my nature was wrong". The word 'fairy' later doubled as a homophobic taunt. Growing up amid news of HIV and AIDS, including the UK's grim public health campaign, he came to feel that being Queer was dangerous, even shameful. Only now, in his fifties, does he publicly embrace his sexuality through an exhibition of the icons, activists and fellow-travellers who inspired him.

The selection is unapologetically subjective. "It's not a who's who of all the brilliant Queer people today," Brown said. "It's about Tim and his journey, both as a photographer and a creative, and the progress of his work." Brown, who has known Walker for over a decade, previously worked with him on Tim Walker: Wonderful Things at the V&A in 2019-20. Exhibition design is by Shona Heath, Walker's collaborator of 30 years.

Why the National Portrait Gallery matters here

In 2020 Walker found a plaque on Highbury Fields commemorating the UK's first public gay rights protest. He was born on the same day. That coincidence launched an odyssey to photograph the civil rights pioneers who built the world he now inhabits — and it makes the NPG, a national institution honouring individual contribution to the UK, the pointed venue. The show reads as an intervention into who gets honoured, and why.

The first photographic room references oil paintings in the NPG's collection dating to the 1500s. "Holbein and Hilliard memorialised the movers and shakers of the Tudor aristocracy for hundreds of years to come," Walker writes. "The trailblazers I photographed made history and deserve to be on our gallery walls too." Early Gay Liberation Front and Stonewall activists, including Shân Veillard-Thomas and Lisa Power, appear in period style, some in the gallery's own centuries-old frames, producing trompe l'oeil (illusionistic) effects.

How do the sitters speak back?

Every portrait is a collaboration. Actress and activist Liz Carr, once lazily cast as school-play monarchs because of her wheelchair, appears as Queen Elizabeth after the NPG's c.1592 'Ditchley Portrait' — with every prop, dress to lapdog, made of paper. The metaphor, per Brown: assumptions about a Queer disabled woman are "paper thin". Fifteen sitters narrate the free audio guides, and their quotes fill the labels. "We're not only showing people's faces, we're also bringing their voices into this building," Brown said.

Intersectionality runs through the show: Sunil Gupta, who has lived with HIV since 1995 and co-founded Autograph, the association for Black photographers, bridges into a quieter room on the early AIDS crisis, featuring survivors, carers and campaigners such as Jimmy Somerville.

What comes after the history?

The second half turns contemporary. Queer Today shows creatives such as Jesse Glazzard, falcon on arm, in sleek modern style. A black-painted room, inspired by Karlheinz Weinberger's 1960s biker photograph and rockabilly iconography, is devoted to the Rebel Dykes, who forged community at Greenham Common and ran the Chain Reaction club in Vauxhall. "I felt they needed a whole room for their big personalities and their big hair," Brown said. The Pinups room gathers Elton John, Chappell Roan, Björk and Kate Bush. The final, carpeted, velvet-brocade room celebrates sexuality outright, drawing on Beardsley, Shunga woodblocks and Fragonard.

"Queerness is as old as humanity, and these images are so joyful," Brown said. "It's an ecstatic finale to the show." Walker's own verdict carries further: "Your difference is your power. Difference is a precious and beautiful thing."