FAILING- NICK KNIGHT / NICK NIGHT ON YAMAMOTO

“That’s exactly what creation is, it’s not being frightened to fail. Every time I take a picture I have to go through a series of failures to get there, usually under extraordinarily excruciating circumstances. It’s very hard to have Kate Moss in front of you – someone considered one of the world’s most beautiful women – and the first Polaroids that come out aren’t very good. All of a sudden she doesn’t look very pretty and it’s because you didn’t photograph her very well. There’s a humbling experience to that which I think is healthy, and you have to work your way through it.”

The disarmingly honest and articulate Knight has always championed the process over the end product. He sees his body of work as “an ongoing communication, a response to events” – from the documentary photographic book Skinhead he published in 1982 (the year he graduated from Bournemouth Art College), via his nine-year-strong ad work for Dior, to his internet baby, the art and fashion website Showstudio www.showstudio.com.
  
“I’ve never seen myself as a classic photographer,”  (but frequently flying. “I don’t particularly care for defining myself in specific terms. I don’t mean that arrogantly, I just don’t find it helpful. I don’t view my work in that triumphant way of producing trophies to hang on walls. That’s why I’ve always shied away from exhibitions and books.” Working “right at the end of what could loosely be described as photography,”


Knight felt that the newer possibilities of the internet offered the perfect outlet for his interests. Having worked for publications including i-D, Vogue, Dazed & Confused, The Face and Visionaire and clients as varied as YSL, Björk, Alexander McQueen, Massive Attack and Calvin Klein, Knight sees Showstudio as a multifaceted platform for exploring his obsession with the process of creating imagery. He’s an unashamed technophile who regards his online experiments as a natural progression of the generations of image-manipulation software (Sitex, Paintbox, Photoshop) that he grew up alongside as a photographer first plying his trade in the 1980s.
  
One of his key relationships of that decade was with Yohji Yamamoto, for whose catalogues he was recruited to shoot in the mid-’80s on the back of his work for i-D. In collaboration with art director Marc Acoli and designer Peter Saville (whose contribution was at Knight’s behest; nobody had previously conceived of a role for a graphic designer in such projects), he helped rethink catalogue convention in ways so distinctive that the team went on to create the next 10 for the label.

  
He’s worked with Jil Sander, Louis Vuitton and Vivienne Westwood. And Comme des Garçons’ visionary designer Rei Kawakubo, who didn’t share Knight’s fascination with exposing the construction of fashion artistry to public view. “She’s a very difficult person to get any process out of at all. She’s very closed in that respect.” Such differences of approach, though, are clearly part of the creative dynamic of fashion, and engagement with the medium’s difficulties and contradictions is key to Knight’s enduring interest in it. “I particularly like fashion because it’s a hard thing to come to terms with. People don’t like the idea that it’s largely motivated by surface, which sadly we are. Going all the way back to Skinhead, it was all about surface.”


That was then. For Knight now, it’s very often about the internet. He explains, recalling the development of his interest in the technology, “a whole load of doors opened up at the same time, with great views through them and lots of promises. It avalanched. It seemed to become coherent with the advent of the internet; it all seemed to be going in the same direction, which was very exciting.”


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