These pictures are a love letter to the conservators, curators, and archivists at the V&A. The work they do is vital. Without their sensitivity and care, there would quite simply be nothing in the museum. Seeing the dress by Alexander McQueen exquisitely wrapped up at the V&A Clothworkers’ Centre, it became a beautiful ghost.

I imagined the characters in these photographs as mannequins coming to life in the museum. When I work with great models like Karen Elson, I often feel as if they control my camera—we perform a telepathic gestural dance.

—Tim Walker

“The poet Dame Edith Sitwell (British, 1887– 1964) had a striking personal style and was incredibly photogenic, especially in her later years as she grew into her extraordinary looks. 
Her flamboyant wardrobe included flowing brocade robes, velvet gowns, turbans, golden shoes, and huge colorful rings.

For this series of portraits, actor Tilda Swinton, who is a distant relative of Edith’s, performed the role of the poet at Renishaw Hall, the Gothic house built by the Sitwell family in the seventeenth century. Portraits of her ancestors line the staircase, and we were instantly enamored with the beauty of the home and the giant white poppies and purple delphiniums in the garden. These pictures are a celebration of age and individuality—it’s a misconception that beauty is confined to the young. As Edith once said, “Why not be oneself?”

I’ve always been seduced by the inky blackness, confidence, and eroticism of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations. I wonder whether they’re more shocking today than when they were first seen over a hundred years ago. Are we more prudish than the Victorians were?

I’ve known Beardsley’s work for years, but when I saw the prints close-up, I could visualize 
them as photographs immediately. The challenge was to represent his mark-making in three-dimensional space. It felt like we were drawing in the air with suspended wires and beads.

—Tim Walker

The stained glass at the V&A is a kaleidoscope of glorious transparent colors, where each panel tells a different story. I love vibrant transparent color—Christmas lights, sweet wrappers, the red lightbulb in a photographic darkroom.

Illuminated red makes me think of my mother. When I was little, she made five big red silk lampshades for our sitting room. A warm glow came out of the house on winter evenings. For me, that color represents coming home. Translucent color provokes an immediate emotional response in me and is central to this photo shoot.

—Tim Walker

As a fashion photographer, I’ve always been concerned with presenting clothing as something living. It was this concern that attracted me to Dieric Bouts’s The Annunciation. Bouts has a sympathy toward fabric: the dresses worn by the Virgin Mary and the angel feel almost three-dimensional. There is a commitment to depicting something alive and not flat. I want my pictures to live, and I really notice the life in these paintings. In Lucas Cranach the Elder’s A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion, I’m interested in the comparative nudity and what it suggests about ourselves.

It’s such a brilliant parallel—to have one painter obsessed by dress and fabric, and then another depicting a wild nudity. In the photographs I’ve made here, I’ve tried to marry the two. I wanted to capture the nudity of Cranach and the cloth of Bouts, the violence of Cranach and the peace of Bouts. To create pictures that feel alive and provoke questions as these two great paintings do.

—Tim Walker

The V&A has a dazzling collection of intricately decorated snuffboxes. As soon as I saw the tiny box with two dragons on it, I visualized an empress walking her pet dragon at night and picking a flower that only blooms during the full moon. The rainbows within the shell on the snuffbox inspired Shona Heath to suggest UV lighting for the photographs, which put an exciting twist on the set design and took me to a world I hadn’t been to before.

Rather than using historical costumes, I wanted the challenge of using the contemporary fashion Zoe Bedeaux selected, complemented by James Merry’s masks and UV makeup by Hungry.

—Tim Walker

All the photographs displayed here are of men. I’m fascinated by the spectrum of masculinity in all its glorious manifestations. The V&A collection includes diverse representations of the male nude.

This euphoric and celebratory shoot took place partly in a valley in Dorset, close to where 
I grew up, and partly in my studio in London, where we created a miniature set. I wanted to magnify the male nude by making it as big as I possibly could to explore the taboo of the homoerotic. The title is from an 1891 novel by William Morris.

—Tim Walker

Among the eight hundred thousand photographs in the V&A collection is one that measures seventy-one yards. It’s the longest photograph I’ve ever seen, and it depicts the Bayeux Tapestry, an object that’s always fascinated me. It inspired me to produce photographs that evoke both the chaos and the beauty of the tapestry.

As the fashion industry can be very wasteful, I liked the idea of everything being recycled, homemade, and hand-knitted for this shoot. We reused things in different ways—old ironing boards became shields; vacuum cleaners became madcap medieval instruments . . . The figures are eco-warriors, the soldiers of tomorrow.

—Tim Walker

We all have a need to store our secrets in a private place that we love. A diary, a scrapbook, or even a phone. The golden key and embroidered casket from the V&A collection feel like an expression of that need to escape. The casket contains a spectacular secret garden. It’s an object of fantasy and transformation, suggesting a world in which you can safely be whoever you want to be, like the London club scene where freedom of expression reigns supreme.

James Spencer, the central figure in this photo shoot, burst out of his family home and into that world dressed as a beautiful woman. These seeds of escapism are sown into the very house in which you find yourself, reminiscent of the constraints of all our childhood homes.

—Tim Walker

Exploring the V&A’s historical paintings from South Asia reminded me of how I feel when I’m in that part of the world. I’ve always been drawn to India . . . the often-chaotic haphazardness contrasting with an almost palpable sense of cosmic harmony.

These photographs are a celebration of the country’s vibrancy and mysticism and its rich history of story- telling. Luckily, England was experiencing a heat wave when we made the pictures, and the Worcestershire delphinium fields were illuminated in an intense light reminiscent of India.

—Tim Walker