One of six fashion photographs given to the V&A by the photographer in 2008. The six are Red Book Mark, Film Still, Vogue with Brolly, Beauty Issue in Red, Camera, Revillion (Page Burst). All made for Vogue, 2003-2004.

Tim Walker is a British fashion photographer based in London. He studied at Exeter Art College, then worked as a freelance photographic assistant before working as Richard Avedon's assistant in New York. He went on to contribute to high-profile magazines including Vogue, W and Harper's Bazaar. He has also shot advertising campaigns for clients including Barneys, Comme des Garcons, Gap and Yohji Yamamoto, and now works predominantly for British and Italian Vogue. Walker's style is lavish and fantastical, often referencing earlier fashion photographs, paintings, or well-known children's stories, in particular the writing of C.S. Lewis, E.H. Nesbitt, T.H. White and Arthur Ransome.

In the early 1990s, as an intern at Vogue, Walker collated the magazine's collection of negatives by the British photographer Cecil Beaton. He draws much of his inspiration from Beaton's work from the nineteen-thirties, forties and fifties, thus there is an interesting link between Walker and the large number of Beaton photographs in the V&A collection. As curator and historian Robin Muir explains: 'Through the heritage of Vogue, [Walker] has re-established tangible links to the romantic strain that marked out Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton as latter-day Gainsboroughs and Zoffanys. He shares with them too a romantic 'spirit of place', more usually rural and paradisal. This, despite an international career, identifies him firmly and forever as an English photographer after their fashion.'

These six fashion photographs were included in the exhibition 'Fashion in the Mirror: Self-Reflection in Fashion Photography' at the Photographers' Gallery, 17 July - 13 September 2008, curated by Michel Mallard and Raphaëlle Stopin. In the exhibition catalogue, Walker comments: 'I saw the old Benito fashion illustration (1924) which shows two girls paging through a copy of Vogue where the models 'Pop-Up' and appear to be coming alive from the pages of the magazine. This is totally where the concept for this series of images sprung from. If every model within a magazine came alive and started to wriggle free from the constrictions of 2-d!' This series is, therefore, particularly interesting in relation to the V&A's collection of fashion illustrations from the early to mid-twentieth century.

In the summer of 2008 Walker had a successful solo exhibition, 'Tim Walker Pictures', at the Design Museum in London. On 26 September 2008, he gave a talk at the V&A about his interest in Cecil Beaton's work.