“Once you connect all those things together, that’s what SHOWstudio is really. It’s a connection of a whole series of real spaces, but just across a new medium.”
By MARK HOOPER

MARK HOOPER: You launched the SHOWstudio website in November 2000 as an online space for leading creatives to make experimental, personal work engaging with the new fields of motion image and interactivity. Why did a fashion photographer decide to concentrate on doing a website?
NICK KNIGHT: Lots of reasons really. One reason was the idea of not being bound by the whole system of the way advertorial and advertising fashion works at the moment, to cut outside of that. So there’s political reasons to do it, and there’s a whole bunch of technological reasons. Things like 3D scanning and webcams and mobile phones; all that stuff is part of the whole communication revolution, and of course you’re coupling it with sound, which is enormously exciting. People say that fashion photographers are frustrated rock stars – I’m not sure if that’s the case, but music is a large part of what I do.

And on another level I’m slightly frustrated by the way art is presented to us in a condescending manner; you’re presented with a piece of art which you don’t understand, which you have to find out about. And to me that does not hold true with what an artist does – an artist wants to communicate and debate and talk about how they see the world. To make this disjointed statement seemed odd. I like the idea of allowing people to see the process, and to some degree to question what I’m doing at any level. On personal experience, I don’t find the end result is the peak of my involvement. The peak is when actually I’m doing it, whether I’m wrestling with the physicality of it in the studio, the mental problem-solving or the aesthetic problem-solving pre- or post-shoot. And all that part of it doesn’t get shown. You’re presented with a glossy magazine cover or a piece of art in a gallery – untouchable! So I wanted to do something that looked at the whole creative process, from conception through to the final piece. I don’t have a problem with people asking me what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. I might not have a good answer, but I don’t have a problem being asked. And the way I take photos is to be part of a small group of people whose opinions I respect, and that didn’t seem to be on show at all, it was always put forward that the photographer was the author and the only person worth talking to about it. And actually, quite clearly, the whole dynamic of working over a long period of time wasn’t being represented by that. I like the idea of performance: when people take photographs they put on a physical performance. I thought there’s a whole chunk of this world that I live in that doesn’t get shown. Sometimes I think it’s the people in the middle protecting their own backs, by not giving any access to that part it makes the art seem more removed, more special.

There is a smoke and mirrors side to it isn’t there, where a lot of photographers don’t want to show what’s going on, maybe because they feel it adds to the mystique.
I guess so, but I think that’s not adding to the mystique so much as missing the good bits. When you first start out there’s a fallacy that certain technical aspects of what you do are important and shouldn’t be shown because they’re secrets – your lighting, your printing or whatever. That’s just bollocks. I’m sure you don’t mind people knowing that you’re using a Sony TCM-313 tape recorder. It might be interesting to some people, but it’s not where the art of your field of communication lies. And in photography the technical aspect is laid up as if it’s responsible for the work – it isn’t. What you’re seeing is their character and their perception and viewpoint on life, so I don’t really see anything to hide.

I think what we’re starting to push towards at SHOWstudio is a new medium – it’s different from TV and print. I don’t want to draw parallels, but when MTV came along it brought a new side of music, the visual side, and I think to some degree that’s what’s going to happen with fashion. Now you’ve got a medium that will – although it’s still very clunky and annoying – allow for more participation and a different way of presenting fashion that you couldn’t before. You couldn’t do what I’m doing at SHOWstudio in print.

I suppose with SHOWstudio you’re relying on the right people getting the right idea under the right conditions.
Yeah. It really is like being first in the supermarket, there’s so much to look at and try. Under the right conditions people are fantastic, under the wrong conditions they’re awful.

SHOWstudio allows me to work with people like Larry Clark or Charlize Theron or Juergen Teller or whoever it is I’m interested in, whereas in print you can’t do that, you can only take a portrait of them. Or, with Björk or Gwen Stefani, do their album cover or their video. But with SHOWstudio I can ask Brad Pitt to recite a poem, which is what I wanted to do. We try and set up this correspondence where you work with another artist and the public are allowed to see that conversation.

I think the interesting thing is when the content is provided by the people who are reading it. On a commercial level, businesses haven’t really worked out that you can use the public to create the content for you.
Absolutely. It’s a two-way medium. At the moment it’s being used very unimaginatively, and people aren’t seeing the parameters of the medium at all and are not pushing it. SHOWstudio is a way of opening up the whole process and allowing people to intervene.

I think until we’re completely live at SHOWstudio we’re nowhere near what we should be doing. We’re trying to go for a live sound feed. But also SHOWstudio isn’t just the one office. The premise of it is that they’re real spaces that just happen to be joined on the Internet. So if you go there you’ll see Craig McDean’s studio next to my studio next to the Comme des Garçons Dover Street studio. And on top of that you get live reports from people using mobile phones. But we’re nowhere near that because SHOWstudio costs a lot of money and I’ve been very bullish about not getting anyone involved financially.

Presumably it’s pretty expensive to do SHOWstudio without any advertisements …
It is pretty expensive. But I earn a certain amount doing what I do, and that’s what I’ve chosen to do with it. It can’t go on like it is anymore, not just because my accountant says stop doing it, but simply because I can’t do what I want to with the sort of finances I have accessible. I can’t earn enough money to take it where I want to take it, and for the last year that’s been very frustrating. I have to get corporate sponsorship. I’m trying to set that up at the moment, in an intelligent way so it doesn’t just become a site that’s a vehicle for sponsors. But that’s a tricky thing. There was some sense to making it independent of any outside investment for the first few years, but that sense went out the window.

At least you’ve stamped your identity on it first.
Well that was the idea of doing something when people were saying, “You can’t do that because it won’t sell.” And also I’ve felt that everything I’ve done has been making money for people. I accept that, it’s part of what I do, whether it’s working for Dior or even photographing pressed flowers, it’s making somebody money. I wanted to do a non-commercial project that wasn’t about making money, that was about the pleasures of creating work and communicating.

I was reading in your book, the one with the velvety cover …
The purple one? That’s a long time ago.

Yeah. And you said you felt you were quite outside of fashion. Do you still feel that way?
To a certain degree. But in the sense that I’m more in control of my work now, I’m less on the outside. I’m not quite as on the fringes in terms of how my work’s positioned. It’s very hard if you’re working for a big mainstream magazine to feel you’re anything but a page-filler. And so it was very hard to invest your time and your emotions there. I’m touching on things I’m more excited by now. I think what we’re doing at SHOWstudio is actually a better way of showing fashion. The product’s better when it moves, because that’s how it was designed. I think that fashion to a large degree has been compromised by having to be shown as a still image. And therefore it seems you can’t really seriously believe that showing fashion as a still image is going to go on being the main thrust of the industry. Now that people have mobile phones more than they have magazines, SHOWstudio is looking at communicating through mobile phones as well as just across the Internet. It’s a different medium and in that way I think we’re more in the center of fashion than a lot of people think, because we’re pushing to create that space. Once you can hear it and see it move and to some degree get involved with it, download it, ask the questions – that’s got to be more exciting than just seeing it when it doesn’t move or do anything. Photography has been a very good vehicle for fashion, but I don’t think it is anymore.

Do you think there’s a sense that a certain amount of creativity has been lost?
I think there’s a sense that the mainstream of fashion doesn’t want to rock the boat, which of course is one of the roles of fashion. Business has a much better grip on fashion than it did ten years ago. They want to sell more units and they’ve worked out their marketing plans. They don’t want to provide questions, they want to provide easy-to-consume answers. And so that’s not particularly useful in terms of creating exciting fashion, it just provides you with a Stepford Wives moment. I think there’s a whole lot of issues that just aren’t addressed and that’s very frustrating. I’ve always come across that and always found it shocking and try to come up with different ways of dealing with it. Sometimes you can’t, you’re stuck. There are some political positions which I don’t hold which I’m forced into holding, because there isn’t an intelligent or a better answer than just doing it and trying to do it better next time.

So I think at the moment that business has such a stranglehold on the existence of magazines and of fashion, and that’s a reason to do the Internet. That’s why I have to be particularly careful that I don’t allow business to come in and reassert another stranglehold in a different medium. I think it is dodgy and there are very few places where you can see work that is about proposing some different way of being and posing some problems for people.

If you look at your career as a whole, there doesn’t seem to be much of a common thread. How would you describe what it is that you’re drawn to?
There isn’t a common thread any other than it’s things that have interested me, whether that happens to be pressed flower specimens from the Natural History Museum or working with disabled models or with Dior. So you’re right, it’s not a very linear or structured way to approach a body of work, but I don’t really see it like that. I’m not really interested in that part of it. I don’t even want people to know what I look like particularly, but that’s a very hard position to maintain. I’m interested in what challenges the work gives me, I’m not in it to make a personality out of myself.

In a way you have to though, whether you want to or not.
You can’t maintain that position very easily. I mean you asked me to do an interview and I’m very happy to talk to you. If someone asks for a picture of me I’m reasonably happy to give it to them, but I don’t want people to know. You can take the position, which I’ve tried, of saying “No, you can’t have a picture of me,” or giving a picture in silhouette, but that’s worse. It creates a mystery where there isn’t a mystery.

The truth of it is I don’t think I’m more interesting than anybody else. I’ve got a platform to express myself, and to some degree what I’m trained to do is express my opinions, but I don’t hold with this idea of personality and celebrity. Personally I don’t like going to parties, I find it acutely embarrassing. I remember when McQueen did that show with the glass box – you sit there looking at your own reflection. Whether he did it consciously or not, I don’t know, but it was a fantastic moment: there was the front row of the fashion industry face to face with their own reflection. Maybe they’re all loving it, but I found it excruciating. Because you sit there, and you know there are models behind the glass that could be looking at you, which is kind of weird. So you’re either looking at your own reflection or you’re  looking at other people’s reflections – Gwyneth Paltrow, Charlotte my wife, Alexandra Shulman – and you end up looking like this [hunches over, eyes on the floor]. That was very clever.

I had an interesting conversation with Mario Testino two years ago after his National Portrait Gallery exhibition, and he had quite a clear decision to put himself forward as a household name, and to accept what went with that. I was quite impressed that he had that vision. I’ve never really wanted to do that, but I can’t not do that. So what he’s doing is a lot more coherent than the position I’m in. I’m uncomfortable whatever I’m doing.

Juergen Teller has very obviously made that decision too hasn’t he – he seems to be in every advertisement he shoots now.
We’re going to do an interview with Juergen on SHOWstudio. I’m quite interested what questions we get sent in. To be completely honest with you, there is a narcissistic part of what I do. I’m not very photogenic; my vision of myself is a long way from the real vision. And as I spend my time making other people look fantastic, I find it very depressing when I see pictures of myself.

But you see what goes into making those people look fantastic …
Yes. But I’ve never applied it to myself. But I still maintain that I’d much rather people just knew the work and didn’t know who I was. I did do a series of pictures for Vogue where I put myself in the picture, in a mirrored room. But I was more interested in trying to articulate the physical connection between the model and the photographer. I film everything I do, but I don’t spend much time watching those – I don’t really have two lives to do that. But on SHOWstudio, making those pictures accessible, you notice the physical performance. We did a series of little films for Galliano about the moment a picture is taken during a session. So what Adam [Mufti – Motion Image Director at SHOWstudio] did was speed the films up, and then slow them down when it comes close to the moment where you take the photograph that gets used. And during that you see the similar physicality between myself and the model, which I’d never been aware of before. I’ve never been comfortable with that David Bailey Blow Up thing. But I was actually throwing more poses than the model was – this ridiculous 45-year-old man doing all sorts of stuff. So I thought it was interesting to exploit that more and purposefully put myself in the photographs, but I put the camera in front of my face so you never saw what my face looked like.

But Juergen’s off on a trip – I don’t know where he’s going or why he’s doing it. In a job that isn’t based on any real validation of what you do, people are just human, they want to be thanked and told they did a good job. Fashion is very bad at saying to the photographer, “You’ve done a really good job, we’ve made a stack of money out of your images” – that just doesn’t happen; whereas other mediums are much more critically scrutinized. You read reviews of sculpture, but unless you go into exhibiting photography, you don’t really get that, there isn’t that critical feedback. So you look at different ways of doing it. Some people push up their fees to exorbitant levels, so they know they must be important, or make a whole series of petulant demands of their clients – how they travel, how they’re accommodated, etc. – it’s a way of saying, “If you do this, you’ll love me.” It’s a basic way of getting praise. People spend their lives trying to get the praise they didn’t get as children. Fashion photography isn’t a stable medium emotionally. The whole threat is that you’re not here tomorrow, you’re a blip and you’re gone – your work is just fashion and so it’s transient. And that’s part of why I like fashion photography, it has that challenge. But it’s a very emotionally unsettling feeling. Actors or artists are allowed to think they’ll have a career. It’s even more acute with the models who are around for a couple of seasons if they’re lucky and that’s it, bit photographers have a similar feeling that they’re going to be out of fashion.

Now, quite where Juergen is at the moment I don’t know. I actually really like what Juergen does. I know people have different views. But I know him well and I’m interested in seeing what he does in his career. But the pictures of him with Charlotte Rampling and the one of him drinking naked on his father’s grave – that’s an enormously powerful set of images to put out without someone saying to you, “What the fuck are you doing?” Those are images that are crying out for people to challenge him. Whether he wants a challenge or he wants attention, I think both are valid.

It’s interesting you talk about the transience of fashion photography, because there is a collectability to it now. There always has been for certain photographers, but it’s treated a lot more as art now and I think you’re definitely a part of that. People would want to see an exhibition of your photos.
I don’t know if they’d ever get that opportunity to be honest. But there is a permanence. As human beings we seek permanence as reassurance. We’re not very good – speaking on behalf of the entire human race – at accepting the value shift, that there aren’t actually any stable values, it’s every shade of grey and no white and no black. It’s not about final solutions; it’s about dealing with problems. Fashion is interesting to me because it pushes that transience further. I like that. I like mistakes. Artistically I’m not happy with permanence. Personally I’m happier with stability, knowing my wife will always love me – those are the things that one desires, but I don’t work very well under those conditions, I like the challenge of turmoil. And actually to some degree it gives me a level of permanence, because I permanently accept life isn’t about stability.

I also 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 [Knight’s seminal book] Skinheads, it was about surface. If you took any one of those skinheads – some of the most notorious ones – and looked below the surface, there was a whole bunch of contradictions and things that didn’t work. But skinheadism was about presenting surface. “You know what we’re about because you see it on our surface.” It’s an interesting point that intellectually people find fashion very difficult to deal with.

Skinheads is interesting because it’s presenting a subject that people would normally shy away from. It’s not beautiful so you don’t want to see it presented as a fashion statement.
I think some of those girls are very beautiful!

But you know what I mean? People automatically see it as an ugly side to society because it’s violent. The knee-jerk reaction is you don’t want to look at it.
They’re different things though. Skinheadism is a big subject and you have to realize it comes in two or three parts: the emergence of the cult in the ’60s and what that meant to those people, and then the revival in the ’70s, and then what it turned into in the ’80s and ’90s.

It became the opposite of what it started off as …
The skinhead symbolism was used to define a new cult.  Certainly when it started it was a different thing. When I did research for the book I spoke to a lot of the original skinheads from ’65, ’66, ’67, which is when it started to form as a coherent cult, and the things that motivated them were not what you would think. The people who danced best weren’t the people who’d fight well – it’s kind of obvious. The people who dressed well weren’t the people who kicked your head in, because you don’t do it in your best suit. When it first started it was more similar to punk. They wore anything that wasn’t fashion. They had been using their father’s clothes. There are different strands of it that came together. That’s what I was particularly interested in – I hit on skinheadism because I was in France and Belgium at the end of the ’60s and I came back to England in 1970 to literally hit the tail end of it. I didn’t know anything, I was right out of the British fashion code – and it was very coded in those days – so I looked like I’d come from Mars; I didn’t fit in with it at all. And I rubbed up against it in all the wrong ways. I fucking hated it. They were the people that made my life a misery. But it became more and more exciting to me. It was something that I associated with my brother’s friends. And the girl next door who I thought was fantastic. It became a thing that was appealing. So when you say it was ugly, it was the girl next door to me, and I always had a thing for the hard girls off the estate. I sought them out when I was younger; it’s where I looked for my girlfriends. So it didn’t have an unattractive side to me, it was exactly the opposite: it was sexually attractive. And then when I got back into it after getting kicked out of – or “asked to leave” – university, I was working in an off-license with skinheads. This was about ’79, so after The Specials and all that sort of thing. Then I got immersed into it when I was doing the book with this particular group of skinheads, and I was naturally drawn to the more extreme part of it and the physical violence, which wasn’t what I was into in the early ’70s.

There aren’t movements like that anymore are there? Everything gets usurped by the mainstream so quickly.
Yeah. It’s just different values now. Times have changed. Youth cults are commercialized now. Back in the ’60s they were largely ignored. Skinheads were ignored by the media completely. When I was doing research for the book, there wasn’t any documentation at all. It was reported as a problem, but not by the sociologists who were reporting very largely on hippies or mods or whatever. But that changed. You couldn’t have that same situation now, of a youth cult growing up for a few years without people spotting it, making a story out of it and it being all over every bit of style press. We did this thing with Simon Foxton on SHOWstudio about a fictitious club called Matinée. And of course it’s already happening out there. There’re already similar scenes to the one he wanted to pretend was going on.

But that’s the problem with the style press in general; a lot of it is eating itself alive and chasing its own tail.
Yeah. You’re going for total global accessibility now. You have websites like japanesestreets.com that show you exactly what’s happening. There’s total visibility. We did a project with Liberty’s where we put a camera in the shop window, creating an instant public participation. People still dress in a very flamboyant way, and it’s moments like that when you see pure instantaneous creativity. There’s no reason not to do that in a number of cities across the globe and couple sound to it – one in LA, one in Moscow, one in Calcutta. Once you connect all those things together, that’s what SHOWstudio is really. It’s a connection of a whole series of real spaces, but just across a new medium.

Mark Hooper is editor at Esquire magazine in London.

Nick Knight was born in 1958 in London. He is the director of SHOWstudio and one of the most influential photographers working today, consistently challenging conventional notions of beauty. His first book of photographs, Skinheads, was published in 1982. He has since produced Nicknight, a twelve-year retrospective, and Flora, a series of flower pictures, both published by Schirmer Mosel. Clients include Alexander McQueen, Christian Dior, and Yohji Yamamoto; editorial work includes work in i-D, Vogue, and Dazed & Confused. Knight’s work has been exhibited at such institutions as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Saatchi Gallery, and Hayward Gallery. He lives and works in London. www.showstudio.com