NICK KNIGHT: Directing the imagination

Nick Knight is just as comfortable in a studio taking photographs as he is traversing the many visual planes of the internet or tending to his beloved garden. Arguably one of the most celebrated fashion photographers of our time, Knight is dedicated to the craft of image making his work defined by a unique way of seeing the world and an ongoing curiosity about the many ways in which a picture can be made.

The recipient of both an OBE and a CBE, Knight’s contributions to photography move beyond the confines of a camera. From his early days at university in Bournemouth, where he painted figures directly onto film, to warping images with scanners and working with virtual reality and 3D printing, he has consistently sought new ways to tell visual stories. In 2000, he founded SHOWstudio, a digital platform that pioneered live fashion broadcasting which has continued to break ground with experiments in 3D imaging, avatars, and AI.

Knight’s creative vision has shaped the visual worlds of artists and designers globally. He’s directed music videos for Björk and Massive Attack, shot an album cover for David Bowie, collaborated with Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander McQueen, and David Chipperfield, and created iconic campaigns for Dior, Tom Ford, and Saint Laurent. We met to discuss the art of storytelling, the joy that comes from growing things, and where he finds inspiration.

hube: Gardens created for monks and philosophers were rich with symbolism and meaning. What kind of ideas do you cultivate in your garden?

Nick Knight: I think gardening and growing things is quite a unique experience—which I wasn’t really expecting. I first started during COVID. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were all told to stay at home and not go anywhere. It occurred to me then that we didn’t know what was going to happen in the future or where our food was going to come from. So I dug a small vegetable patch, made a greenhouse, and started planting food: potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli, and all sorts of other things.

I found that tending to the garden—planting the first seed, watching it grow in the green- house, and then planting it outside—was quite a spiritual process, which is strange for a man who’s not religious. It touched a part of me that I hadn’t really acknowledged before. I got a lot of pleasure from doing it. There’s a lot of joy in just being outside in the garden, which is very different from what I normally do. Usually, I’m in a white studio taking photos or editing, so spending time in such a different environment was refreshing.

I’m not sure if it initiated any particular ideas, but it gave me a new approach to life, or a deeper understanding of it—which I might not have gained had I not taken up growing things. There’s something marvellous and uplifting about planting a tiny seed and watching it grow into a two-metre-tall plant covered in fruit. It’s a fundamental part of life, but unless you grow things yourself, you don’t really appreciate how magnificent that transformation is.

These fruit and vegetables taste very different from what you buy in shops. Shop-bought food is often processed, irradiated, and stored for ages. In a garden, after the tomatoes are gone, that’s it until next season. This awareness of the seasons and what’s available becomes quite important.

There’s also something lovely about growing too much produce—because with vegetables, you often end up with more than you can eat. For example, if you plant one Jerusalem artichoke you get 30 or 40 back. You end up with wheelbarrows full, and you give them to people you care about, you swap recipes, it becomes a whole thing. I’m not very religious—I’m an atheist, in fact—but the symbolism of bread and the act of sharing food fascinates me.

h: Metaverses are emerging as a new dimension of human experience, one that transcends borders, nationalities, and genders. In your opinion, сould they be prototypes for a future reality?

NK: I don’t think it’s a future reality, I think it’s the present reality. Of course, it will evolve and become more widespread, but it’s already here for people who go online and play games. They’re already living in an alternative reality. Again, this goes back to the pandemic; while I don’t want to put too much emphasis on something that’s essentially a revolting disease, it did force us to change the way we think about life. I was doing a lot of remote shooting. For example, we have a studio in California, and one of my assistants there would set it up for me, I could see through the computer what the camera saw, allowing me to shoot from my home in Richmond, London. I didn’t need to travel to California, Paris, or anywhere else, I could shoot from home.

It’s a different way of working, but it wasn’t completely alien to me. When I direct films, I’m often looking at two or three cameras and talking to the camera operators about where to move their cameras. So, in that sense, that situation felt quite normal. As a director, you’re not usually the one holding the camera, you’re overseeing it. Sometimes there are 15 cameras, and you’re managing them all. I guess, rather than being the photographer who holds the camera and controls everything, I leaned more into that role during the pandemic.

For instance, I’d get up at five o’clock in the morning to connect with the California studio at the end of their day, do a portrait shoot, then have my breakfast, spend time in the garden, and perhaps later in the day, I’d be on another shoot. It was a routine that spanned different worlds. I live in a beautifully designed David Chipperfield house in Richmond with a lovely garden, so my environment is very important to me. I could exist in that space, dress in a particular way, and be a certain version of myself—but then I’d step into a virtual studio, or a virtual link to a studio on the other side of the world. It felt as though life was becoming richer, not poorer.

Conventionally, I would have had to travel to California for a single portrait shoot, which sometimes I still do. But you lose so much time travelling, adjusting to the time difference, and dealing with the exhaustion. So I was very happy not to have to do that. For me, it felt like we were already moving into a new way of working—different metaverses or virtual realities were becoming part of our lives, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t fear it.

h: Photography seems to remove time from the complex equation of life, leaving only a collection of moments. How do you perceive time?

NK: Well, I think photography stretches time. For instance, if I took a picture of you now, I would remember you exactly, and I could look at that image in half an hour, a day, or a week, and that moment would come back to me. If I don’t take a picture, the image will fade and eventually disappear from my mind.

I think that stretching of time is quite interesting—it allows you to capture more of your life. That’s one of the things photography is very good at; it creates more life for us by preserving these moments. In that sense, I think it answers your question. I’ve always found photography to be a very good way of making life feel like it exists a little bit more.

h: For a long time, art was preoccupied with the pursuit of beauty and harmony. But perhaps beauty must be flawed, and it is this flaw that brings it closer to the human experience.

NK: Yeah, I think beauty is, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder. I have this belief that everyone is beautiful, you just have to care enough to see it in them. It’s not about looking a certain way; it’s about someone seeing beauty—or wanting to see beauty—in a person, a tree, or a rose. If you want to see it, it’s there.

There’s a beautiful side to everyone, whether it’s the curve of an eyelash, the shape of a jawline, or the way they move. You can always find beauty in people. If you define beauty narrowly, which is something I’ve fought against in fashion, you’re limiting yourself. In many ways, fashion has been simplistic in its treatment of beauty and not very open-mind- ed about what is considered beautiful. This is partly due to the inherent capitalism and commercialism of the fashion industry. People would argue, “Well, if we use someone who looks a certain way, most people won’t find them beautiful, so they’re not aspirational and therefore not good for our product.” But that’s been changing over the past 30 years or so. I’ve actively pushed for different ways of seeing and understanding people.

People are fascinating, and it’s not just about shape. There’s now, thankfully, much more interest in people who are curvaceous, who have larger figures, and of course, there’s beauty in that. We only need to look at painters like Rubens or Botero, who celebrated larger figures. It just didn’t come through in fashion, and that’s something I’ve been trying to correct. Then there’s the issue of age. Fashion has tended to glorify youth, often favouring those between 18 and 20 who are at their physical peak before any signs of ageing set in. But it depends on what you’re looking for. There are beautiful people in their eighties and nineties, it just depends on the message you want to convey. Beauty, in many ways, is more meaningful when it’s attached to something less perfect, less ideal. The idea of perfection is odd. Symmetry, for example, is something I’ve encountered in beauty campaigns, sitting next to art directors who say one nostril is too big compared to the other, asking if we can make them the same size, as if that would make the person more beautiful. But we don’t fall in love with people because they have symmetrical faces. We fall in love with people because they make us laugh or because they make us happy—it’s never about perfect symmetry.

We don’t fall in love with a plastic object; we fall in love with a person. If you can show that in your work, or at least convey that approach, it brings out a deeper understanding of beauty. Symmetry can be boring because it’s too simple, too predictable. Asymmetry, things that are more complex, make us think harder and feel more alive. It engages our emotions and intellect in a way that simple perfection doesn’t.

When creating an image, there are three things you should aim for. The first is to capture people’s attention—if they don’t look, they won’t see it. Next, you need to tell them something, to start a story, but the key is to let them finish the story themselves. If you present a simplistic form of beauty, you get their attention and start the story, but they won’t finish it because you’ve already told them everything. The goal is to make people think, to make them question the image and feel emotionally connected to it. If you give them all the information straight away, it becomes too easy to decode, and it won’t stay with them. Imagery that’s more complex, as long as it grabs attention and directs their imagination, leaves room for them to do the work—and that’s when it becomes meaningful.