The photographs by Tim Walker resonate with the imaginative world of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass through their playful distortion of space, scale, and narrative logic. The giant chessboard immediately evokes the chess game that structures Carroll’s mirror world, where movement across squares becomes a metaphor for transformation and passage.
At the same time, the images echo the visual atmosphere of John Tenniel, whose illustrations shaped the iconic look of Alice’s universe. Walker’s staging, however, pushes this imagery into a theatrical and slightly surreal territory, blending historical references with childlike imagination.
The presence of Edie Campbell moving across the oversized chessboard suggests a contemporary Alice navigating an unstable landscape, where fashion, art history, and fantasy intersect. Like Alice herself, she appears both participant and observer inside a world governed by strange but compelling rules.
In this way, Walker’s images do not simply illustrate Alice; they recreate the sensation of entering her world. Perspective bends, the familiar becomes uncanny, and the viewer is invited to step onto the board and wander through a dreamlike terrain where history, play, and imagination meet.
