Tim Walker is one of my favourite photographers, I love the joy and sense of humour he conveys in the work he made for Vogue Italia and British Vogue. Walker has a close working relationship with Shona Heath, who designed and built the sets for a lot of the literally fantastic productions they worked on.
In 2019 The Victoria and Albert Museum held an exhibition called Wonderful Things. Walker had been given access to the treasure trove that is the V&A archives and made new work inspired by some of the pieces he found. Heath designed the wonderful exhibition where the visitor walked from room to room and where each room showed a different world. The focus was still on Walker's photography but seeing Heath's work alongside his emphasized that a fashion photography production isn't a one-manshow. The V&A exhibition was a great success with a large number of visitors.
The Wonderful Things exhibition can now be visited at the Kunsthal Rotterdam (September 2022-January 2023). The Kunsthal advertises the exhibition as made by the V&A and specially designed for the Kunsthal by Dutch collective Maison the Faux. I was looking forward to seeing what they had added to the original exhibition design made by Shona Heath. Unfortunately the answer is very simple: nothing. Some of the objects from the Victoria and Albert archives can't travel, so it is understandable that those pieces were absent. However, I feel it is a missed opportunity that Maison the Faux didn't add something of their own magic touch to the exhibition. Still, if you haven't seen the original exhibition in London it is worth going to this version in Rotterdam.
