Showman

Aperture; Winter2009, Issue 197, p68-75, journal.

"Just as I'm leaving Nick Knight's London home he stops to show me a curious object. White, triangular, and about two inches thick, it's a section of his old studio floor: the accumulated mass of twenty years of painting and repainting for shoots. "Look at the layers," he urges me. "Most people went for white paint but there's a pink layer, there's a green one, there's blue. It's like geology!" This is emblematic of the photographer. One of the best-respected and most innovative fashion photographers of our time, he is fascinated by the process of image-making. He is also generously collaborative, has more than a touch of the scientist, and is extremely dedicated. Two inches of paint is an awful lot of shoots." 

 "-he's also well known for his technical innovation, pushing fashion photography to its limits and beyond. After discovering, experimenting with, and championing cross-processing -- that is, processing one type of film with chemicals normally intended for another type -- and acetate masks, he picked up on the manipulative potential of Scitex image-processors and Quantel Paintbox early on."

Shooting Naomi Campbell for Yohji Yahamoto - "I got her to move around on a shiny piece of white Plexiglas with flashes in the background; it's a red head, which is a tungsten light in front, so that when the flash went off it froze her silhouette, and the tungsten light blurred the image inside that outline. Naomi put on a tape Prince had given her. Witnessing the whole thing was amazing. Just this girl in a red coat dancing to Prince: it was such a vision. But then I thought: "No one is going to see this, people will just see the 1/125 of a second, and that's such a shame because I've had a ball today. I've seen the best live visual art I can imagine."

Then it occurred to me that a still image wasn't really the best way to show fashion, because designers create pieces of clothing to be seen in movement."

Reading his interviews is so inspiring, you can visualise his thoughts of the progression in his photographic aesthetics, how he moved from pushing that one idea to the impossible edge, which naturally leads onto the next bigger idea.