Nick Knight | Prestige Hong Kong (Feb 19)

Photographer NICK KNIGHT talks to zaneta cheng about looking to the future and why fashion imagery plays an important role in documenting human experience

The way you are, the way you do your make-up, the way you dress – you’re constantly influenced by the many images you see, be it on the street, on your phone, in magazines,” says Nathalie Herschdorfer, art historian and curator of the exhibition Beyond Fashion: 100 of Today’s Must-See Fashion Images Come to Artistree. “You think you forget them? No. You absorb them and parts of them stay in your mind.”

We’re seated in an alcove surrounded by images of glossy, beautiful, perfect women taken by contemporary fashion photographers such as Ellen von Unwerth, Peter Lindbergh and Glen Luchford. The models are all beautiful, all alluring – ideals of what women want to become and what men want women to be.

Herschdorfer’s background is in photography, not fashion, but her specialised interest in the history of photography means that she looks at a fashion image and sees “beyond the fashion in that sense, because everything in the exhibition was originally commissioned to sell fashion, to sell fashion magazines and made for the fashion industry, but in addition to their initial purposes these images say something about our society. 

“We need dreams, and we have writers to tell stories with words and photographers who tell their stories through images. And of course, the success of fashion photography is precisely because we’re so seduced by the dreams that these images sell.”

Many of the images in the exhibition contain this quality; the model that stands the test of time has the most striking face, the most striking figure, buoyed and beautified with an army of hair and make-up artists, stylists, editors, lights and the photographer. These teams sell a hyper-idealised and somewhat unattainable level of beauty that has altered society’s perception of what the perfect body or the perfect face is. However, Herschdorfer also provides counterpoint in the form of younger, sometimes less-established fashion photographers where the work is more natural, less manufactured and sophisticated. 

“There are many different approaches in the exhibition,” Herschdorfer says. “But there’s all kinds of new language coming along with each new generation.”

One of the most prominent figures to have pioneered such a new language is Nick Knight, whose lens is renowned for capturing the less obvious aspects of beauty, be it in the clothing or in the model, and who pioneered Showstudio, a platform for fashion film.

Very early on, after a brief spell as a human biology student at university, Knight picked up his camera to document skinheads, the youth cult prominent in 1970s and ’80s London. It was a move that on the surface was motivated by his self-admitted interest in skinhead girls. In retrospect, Knight now looks back at the project and sees the endeavour as “about finding things you like and the wider social ramifications of being involved in youth. It was a rite of passage for me, where I could find out what sort of person I was, what I would accept, what I wouldn’t accept, but it began because I liked skinhead girls dancing and nothing more complicated than that.”

But Knight has evolved his relatively straightforward initial motivation into an art form that offers an alternative perspective on the industry. When he began seriously to pursue photography, he avidly consumed every book on the subject in the library and found kinship in fashion photography. It became for Knight a vehicle through which to explore and document the human experience. “Photography allows you to follow your desires, to follow that unknown path – but I’ve always been very aware of how photography is not the bringer of truth. It’s very subjective,” he says. “I think photography has been saddled with this idea that it brings truth versus painting because it’s mechanical, but it’s not true.

“Go back to photographers like Roger Fenton – one of the very, very early photographers in England – who was sent to the Crimean War battlefields to record ‘the truth’ of war. And the first thing he does is to look through his camera and say, ‘OK, if we move the cannon balls over there a bit and push the corpse a bit this way…’ in order to say more about the horrors of war. But he’s already started to manipulate the world in front of him to make a better photograph to express his opinion on how horrific war is.”

For Knight, the fashion image is hugely important in showing how cultures evolve and in reflecting people’s ever-changing desires. But when he arrived on the scene in 1982, photography was at a stage where, like rock music, it was considered hypersexualised, with protagonists such as Helmut Newton and David Bailey – and, according to Knight, fashion was a complicit bedfellow.

“In 1982, it was all about a woman’s waist or her bottom or cleavage and I really hated all of that,” Knight recalls. “I felt it was vulgar and stupid and a bit like you hate everything that comes before you, but at the same time I had to prove to my parents that I was doing something serious and I didn’t like them thinking I had taken photography as a way of getting more sexual partners.”

Through a series of fortuitous circumstances and serendipitous encounters, Knight ended up working for Yohji Yamamoto, shooting his men’s and women’s catalogues. Knight is reverential when mentioning the Japanese fashion giant, his eyes lighting up. “Yohji’s campaigns were never sexualised. Very much about the poetry of his aesthetics. His clothes were all about a woman’s mind, a woman’s intellect. The woman is a total person, not an object, and I agreed with that completely. I found somebody who was speaking the same language. I found it incredibly inspiring and gave my heart and soul to Yohji for three years. I didn’t work for anybody else.”

For Knight, the idea of photography and fashion as languages for ways to see the world is paramount, but the industry needs to keep looking forward.

He asks me if I know Gemma Ward, the Australian model. “I think Gemma has one of the most beautiful faces,” he tells me. “When I shot her, I would go on to the set and deliberately knock all the lights down. Her face is so interesting that she looks beautiful in any light.”

It’s this openness to seeing life and beauty in unique ways that goes some way to explaining Knight’s creation in 2000 of Showstudio. Fed up with the commercialisation of fashion and the accompanying constrictions on fashion photography, he saw an opportunity to take fashion imagery one step further with the dawn of the digital age.

“I’ve always filmed all of my sessions, right back to the ’80s,” he says. “I realised that there was something interesting in the way the clothes moved. I was still taking photographs, of course, but when the model moved and turned, the dress would flow around, and I thought: clothes were made to be worn with movement so it’s strange that we spend our whole time photographing clothes as a still image. I started thinking about the idea of the fashion film as a better way of showing clothes.”

Fashion films are – first, foremost and above all – not narrative driven. The video is meant only to show clothes in movement. Indicating multiple shots of a model leaping through the air, Knight explains that the fashion film would be of that same scene only in one movement. Interestingly, though he has no qualms voicing his discontent with some of the malaise within the industry and the slow pace of fashion opening up to new worlds of possibility, he stands by the fashion team from which images are made, moving or otherwise. “Great Hollywood directors are not fashion filmmakers,” he says. “None of them understand the subtleties of creating great fashion.

“They don’t understand that when a model turns her ankle half an inch that way, it makes all the difference in the world to the line of the dress. An actress will not be happy being asked to do the same thing 300 times, but a fashion model would accept repeating the motion 300 times just to get it right. It’s a completely different way of working. And in terms of the end product, the end product in a fashion film is to create desire for that garment so that the consumer will think: that is the dress I want next season.”

Thirty of the films at Showstudio have been selected for screening at Beyond Fashion at Artistree. The medium has gained incredible traction. Knight’s willingness to embrace digital at a time when Condé Nast CEO Jonathan Newhouse, approached with the opportunity to back Showstudio in its nascence, preferred to look into television, has paid off with myriad campaigns where he’s now asked to shoot video first, stills second.

Knight is adamant that though the road to fashion film becoming the primary method of consuming fashion imagery remains a long one, its acceptance is key to the fashion industry’s survival. “I think societies evolve by becoming bigger, embracing more rather than shutting down and becoming less. I think fashion is very good at opening things up, and because it plays such an important role in societies it needs to look to the future to succeed.”