“I’ve just spent an hour on my head,” says Nick Knight when he answers the phone, the gentle noise of a London park heard indistinctly in the background. “I do pilates three times a week with an instructor, and every other day by myself.” It’s a levelling start to a conversation with one of the most influential artists in Britain, who one might picture inside the white-walled fashion film incubator he has led from Belgravia since 2000 – SHOWstudio – and perhaps dressed in one of his signature tailored suits.
Then again, Knight has spent his entire career evading expectations. For over four decades, he has wielded an uncompromisingly forward-looking vision, in the process birthing some of the most important, radical and impossibly beautiful fashion images of our times. He transformed Devon Aoki into an ethereal glass-eyed warrior for Alexander McQueen in the 1990s, made John Galliano’s gowns into painterly explosions in the 2000s, and, in recent years, shaped the visual worlds of artists like Lady Gaga and Travis Scott. Despite being considered a master of his medium, celebrated by institutions around the globe and awarded a CBE for his contributions to fashion photography, Knight doesn’t really regard himself as a photographer at all.
This is perhaps because he’s always reached beyond the limits of a camera, warping images with Scitex Scanners and something called a Quantel PaintBox in the 1980s – a nascent form of photoshop that required an operator – to pioneering experiments with film, AI, virtual realities and 3D printing in recent years. Always approaching his practice as both a science and an art, he says all of this simply comes from an urge to make visible that which he has never seen before. It’s a desire that can be traced back to his days as a student. In the 1970s, Knight was an improbable skinhead and budding medic who abandoned dreams of being a doctor to go to Bournemouth and Poole College of Art. Immediately, he baffled photography tutors by painting shadowy graphic scenes onto his images. “I started off by painting onto negatives,” he explains. “So it wasn’t really photography in the first place.”
Here, alongside telling the story behind the first image he made at university, he shares how an early commission from i-D went awry and why failure makes us more human.
Nick Knight: I’ve always said photography is a sort of passport into the world. My father had a camera for his antique business and I would ask to take it out on Saturday afternoons. I’d go out to Cambridge and hang around in the market square or the bus station, as young teenagers do. It was just a way of going up to people.
I arrived at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art with no artistic training. I didn’t do a foundation. I knew nothing about the arts at all, other than the sort of brief, minimal amount one just gets by sort of absorbing things from museums or magazines. I just started creating these images, which were very, very graphic. The [tutors] didn’t know what they were. It was a bit of a conundrum straight away. But I didn’t really care.
I would take a photograph, then print it as a print, and then make a negative out of it by contacting it again in the darkroom, and then dry the negative paint on that with black ink. Effectively, you’re painting with white on the final, and then make another negative from that.
That particular photograph, and why I sent it to you, is because it sort of represented a question mark for me when I created it. I had no idea what it was, what its function was, what it was supposed to describe, but I just wanted to create it. That was what I wanted to do immediately as I started my course. All you can do is follow your desires. That’s always been the same, right away through my career. Always try to create images you want to see – not images you can see.
I first came across skinheads in the early 70s when I came back from France. Skinheadism was in full flow as it were. I was kind of slightly late in life to be doing that sort of shenanigans, but it was great. The problem is the way one perceives that scene now is so far from the way it was at the time. That was how I wanted to be – the music I wanted to listen to, how I wanted to dress, what I liked in girls. It’s kind of natural when you’re that age, you just do what you want to do. A bit like photography, really.
I went to see Terry [Jones] in Sheriff Road, which is where i-D was at the time. They published my pictures of skinheads, and then I did some more pictures of some people and my friends in Bournemouth. Odd types, rockabillies and different groups. i-D famously published the wrong name under the pictures. There was an ex Rolling Stones bouncer called Strang, S-T-R-A-N-G, who was, as you can imagine, a big chap and fairly hostile, but we got on okay. I did a portrait of him, but there was also a shot of this girl with blonde hair who wanted to be like Marianne Faithfull called Angie. They miscredited Strang as Angie and Angie, Strang. He wasn’t pleased, but he wasn’t so displeased that did anything unpleasant to me. That was very much my experience of i-D throughout that time. It was charmingly disorganised, but I liked that.
At that time, I think I saw photography as a way to find out about the world around me. That’s what’s propelled me – a curiosity about the world and curiosity about people. Whether it’s Robert De Niro or a mountain, an amazing dress by Alexander McQueen or John Galliano. It was a way to interact with the people and the places and the situations. I think people are extraordinary, and they keep becoming more fascinating. I’m very bad at not speaking to strangers. I speak very readily to people in the street. I keep getting told it’s not the best thing to do.
[When I look at that shot from Bournemouth], I think what has remained in my work is the openness to it. I still don’t know what it is. I’ve just done a small, six inch long sculpture of a friend of mine who was pregnant. We 3D scanned her, took out her pregnant tummy, leaving a sort of inverted sphere, and then put a raw egg inside it. The white of the egg flows across her body, and it looks like she’s sort of holding life inside her. It’s a very beautiful little sculpture. It’s conceived exactly the same way as that picture that we’re talking about. It’s just something I wanted to see.
Black Ink Negative Print, 1979
Image courtesy of Nick Knight