Tim Walker shot the cover of Harry Styles’ Fine Line in 2019. Seven years on, the photographer has put Styles on the walls of London’s National Portrait Gallery, and this time he isn’t wearing anything.
The nude portrait, which Billboard describes as an outtake from the Fine Line shoot, is one of about 250 pictures in Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends, which opened Friday (Oct. 9). Time Out’s critic, India Lawrence, found Styles “crouching naked, on top of a stile.” The gallery’s content warning covers nudity, adult themes and some sexually explicit imagery.
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That’s the headline, but it isn’t the point. Walker spent five years, by the gallery’s count, photographing queer activists, artists, performers and their allies for a show billed as a celebration of more than 50 years of queer activism, community and love. Chappell Roan, Lady Gaga, Frank Ocean and Björk are here. So are nurses from the AIDS crisis and the activists who marched at Britain’s first Gay Liberation Front demonstration in 1970.
“It was important to have the sung and the unsung,” Walker told W. “We go to the National Portrait Gallery to see who the movers and shakers are, and these are the movers and shakers for me.”
From the ‘Queeristocracy’ to the Disco
The show starts with a replica of the plaque marking that first demonstration, held in Highbury Fields on Nov. 27, 1970, which is also the day Walker was born. The first room is what he calls his “queeristocracy”: founders of the Gay Liberation Front and Stonewall, shot like Tudor nobility after Hans Holbein the Younger and Nicholas Hilliard. Tom Robinson, the singer behind “Glad to Be Gay,” poses in Tudor dress holding a kestrel. Olivette Cole-Wilson, a founding member of Stonewall, holds a blackbird.
Music runs right through it. A section on the HIV/AIDS crisis hangs the health workers, nurses and researchers who fought the epidemic beside Soft Cell’s Marc Almond, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson and Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Somerville. “The brilliance of their music boomed despite the fear of mortality and discrimination,” Walker said, as quoted by designboom. “I wanted to bring that disco to the ward.” London’s underground is in the mix too, through the DJ Jeffrey Hinton, the musician Tom Rasmussen and the nightlife photographer Roxy Lee, and so is Kate Bush, another artist Walker has made album art for.
A central room belongs to the Rebel Dykes, a post-punk collective Walker shot in big group portraits inspired by Karlheinz Weinberger’s photos of 1960s biker gangs. One has four women in leather jackets and towering beehives, sitting on chairs in a field. Fashion takes over the second half, with designers including Jean Paul Gaultier, Stephen Jones and Michaela Stark, and the actors include Ncuti Gatwa, Hunter Schafer, Ben Whishaw and Ian McKellen. The exhibition was designed by Shona Heath, Walker’s longtime collaborator, who won an Oscar for her production design on Poor Things.
‘Celebrity Bingo’
Not every critic is sold. Time Out gave the show three stars out of five, calling what follows the first room “reams and reams and reams of famous people.” “If you want to play celebrity bingo, you will adore this,” Lawrence wrote. She liked it best when it got strange: the late Paul O’Grady floating in a bubble in a hot-pink Marie Antoinette gown, Miriam Margolyes, 82, posing topless with two Belgian buns covering her breasts, and a final, over-18s-only room of erotic scenes drawn from nursery rhymes, mythology and folklore.
It has been a big week for Styles watchers, who also got him comparing notes on fame with Thom Yorke for Rolling Stone. And Fairyland opened a day after Tate Britain’s The 90s, so London now has two new shows putting pop culture on museum walls. The gallery’s own short film about Fairyland is below.
For Walker, it’s the end of a chapter. “I think I need to put the camera down for a few years,” he told W. “This show is the best thing I’ve ever done.” Fairyland runs at the National Portrait Gallery until Feb. 7, 2027.
- Dates
- Oct. 9, 2026 – Feb. 7, 2027
- Where
- National Portrait Gallery, London
- Curator
- Susanna Brown; designed by Shona Heath
- In the show
- About 250 portraits, including Harry Styles, Chappell Roan, Frank Ocean, Lady Gaga and Björk
