Through Tim Walker’s lens: a fantastical stage for queer icons at the National Portrait Gallery

On view from October 9th, 2026 to February 7th, 2027, Fairyland: Love and Legends celebrates queer identity, community and love through Tim Walker’s theatrical visual language. The exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery gathers around 250 portraits made over five years, tracing decades of activism, cultural resistance and self-expression.

Remembering the HIV/AIDS crisis through music and solidarity

One section revisits the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s through portraits of healthcare workers and musicians who helped shape the response to the epidemic. Alongside those who fought for better care and effective treatments are Marc Almond, Holly Johnson and Jimmy Somerville, whose music offered a soundtrack to an era marked by fear and discrimination.

“I wanted to bring that disco to the ward,” Walker explains, honouring the music and tireless advocates who raised awareness and fought for better care. His portraits connect intimate encounters with collective memory, recalling the solidarity forged in the face of loss and prejudice.

The Rebel Dykes: portraits of a radical community

A central room celebrates the Rebel Dykes, a post-punk collective active in campaigns for nuclear disarmament, environmentalism, sex-positive feminism and HIV solidarity. Inspired by Karlheinz Weinberger’s photographs of 1960s biker gangs, Walker creates large-scale group portraits that capture the movement’s defiant spirit. An accompanying film lets the women reflect on their shared history and political work.

Friendship, resistance and the determination to live on their own terms emerge as defining threads in this portrait of a radical community.

Fashion, drag and the art of becoming

The exhibition’s second half embraces fashion, makeup and performance as tools of self-invention. Walker photographs designers Jean Paul Gaultier and Michaela Stark; performers Paul O’Grady, David Hoyle and Midgitte Bardot; and television personalities Alan Carr and Sue Perkins. Actors Ncuti Gatwa, Hunter Schafer, Fiona Shaw and Ben Whishaw appear alongside musicians Björk, Lady Gaga, Frank Ocean and Chappell Roan.

The portraits draw on Walker’s fascination with theatricality and fantasy, favouring extravagant gestures and striking characters. Identity emerges as something fluid and self-fashioned, free from the constraints of conventional portraiture.

The final rooms feature erotic scenes that recast fairy tales and nursery rhymes through a queer lens. Humour, desire and fantasy challenge familiar narratives while celebrating the freedom to be seen on one’s own terms.

Shona Heath’s fantastical world of fairyland

Designed by Walker’s long-time collaborator, Shona Heath, and supported by the National Portrait Gallery, this exhibition brings Walker’s imaginative universe to life in the gallery.  Read our interview with Heath to find out more about her unconventional path into set design and her approach to blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality in photography.

For Walker, Fairyland is also a personal declaration of belonging. He describes the project as a way to claim his place within the queer community and reach those who may feel alone. Difference, his work insists, is a source of beauty and strength.