A fashion photograph should “send you into a haze, a dream, a fantasy”, says photographer Tim Walker. “It’s about entertainment: impossible happenings, such as a giant glove, a pink cat, an outsize string of pearls.”

Now a Vogue institution, Walker is famed for his very British, Alice-in-Wonderland aesthetic. He has shot Erin O’Connor as a goose, Lily Cole as a peacock girl standing awkwardly on a mantelpiece in a dilapidated mansion, a redcoated Otis Ferry crammed into a tiny room with a pack of beagles – and they’re all on display in his first exhibition, I Love Pictures, and a beautiful coffee-table book, Pictures.

Not bad for someone who was fired by Richard Avedon just over a decade ago.

“It was amazing but hideous,” Walker says of his first job after Exeter Art College. “I went to assist him in New York. I learnt a lot, but he would literally kick you into shape. There was this awful hierarchy: I was assistant No 4, which meant that if there was a dog turd in the street, I would have to clear it up before Juliette Binoche’s limo arrived. I got sacked for not running to pick up the phone: instead I would creep in a polite English way past the models and stylists.”

In the event, Walker’s terribly English sensibilities have been his trump card.

He is prized for his epic sets – beds on top of Jaguar cars in fantasy forests, illuminated gowns hanging from trees, an entire sailing boat in an oak-panelled library. “I love the sets more than anything,” says Walker. “Anything decaying, the Miss Havisham syndrome, the countess in squalor.”

The girls, too, bring something vital. “English girls have a theatricality,” he says. “When Karen [Elson] and Erin [O’Connor] first started, they were freak chic. I was told not to make them look like freaks, but pretty, and I couldn’t understand that.” Fellow redhead Lily Cole is one of his most photographed: “Lily came to me when she was still at school,” he says. “She was stiff as a board, but then I watched her transform into something extraordinary – a stunning, traditional beauty.

“I’m a bit of a homing pigeon: I don’t like going abroad. British people understand my references. If I work with a girl from Germany, South Africa or Brazil, well, a lot of models are silly about [fantasising] and don’t get into it.” He needs a girl who understands “the beauty of a jam jar. I’m always on the hunt for old milk bottles and grannies who have battenburg cake in their cupboards”.

Times recommends

• Are eldest children really a cut above?
• Peaches Geldof: censored
• Top 10 style-setting films of all time