Fashion Neurosis with Nick Knight

46:53But you don't know who this model is, where she's going, who her boyfriend, girlfriend. It's not telling you a narrative. It's just allowing you to understand. If you want the narrative which is already imbued in the clothing. So whoever made that piece of clothing, Courrèges or whoever it would be, would have imbued a piece of clothing with a narrative. and so we want the model's role is to deliver that narrative through a fashion photographer's lens now just to have three seconds either side of that so that going back to that example of rushka or twiggy jumping across in one of those great avidon photographs which are sort of the quintessential fashion photograph of the 20th century jumping across that gray background full of dynamic etc etc if you have just a little bit of movement either side that's all it needs it's just that moment brought to life but then of course when we bring something to life when we give it time so rather than just existing as a single frame then you bring in sound and sound is such an important way of understanding a piece of film and you know from the incredible soundtracks on peter greenaway films um or you know all the importance of of sound in cinema is so huge and if you go to cinema you expect to cry you crying is something that we kind of expect our films to be able to make us do yeah we don't expect it of photography it's very strange yeah that's sort of yeah i would argue slightly emotionally stunted medium photographers are going to hate me now so that's film makers of photographers hating me doing well um um photography is in some ways a slightly emotionally stunted because it when's the last time you saw a photograph that reduced you to tears other than one that shows a social appalling social yeah you know how cruel humanity is but a fashion photograph that can reduce you to tears i would argue it's very very very few and far between but film it's normal you go and see pretty much any film at cinema and you'll expect to laugh or to cry or to be scared you know all emotions which film delivers very very easily um and i think that's to do with combination of film and sound so imagery and sound yeah god that's such a good point so all of that had to be invented to try and make fashion films work um and of course the delivery platform for a fashion film is really important you know delivery platform for a fashion photograph had been the magazine and that had been a very very very good way to to deliver a very very good vision of fashion and have been supported by the magazine special photographers were supported and encouraged and financed and given the time and the money and etc etc etc to make great fashion photographs Avedon was given two weeks in Japan with Diana Vreeland to do 10 pictures that's the time and support they needed and when they went in you know the magazine was thrilled to get them so you had that support you needed that for fashion film you needed something think that supported fashion film so that's a bit what show studios became as a medium that was supporting fashion film and trying to give it its you know its time and its place it's taken me 25 years to get to even a vague conclusion of what fashion film should be but if we trace that back to the advent of fashion photography fashion photography arguably arguably starts around when my mum was born in 1915, with Baron Adolf de Meijer and Steichen, Edward Steichen, great photographers working for Condé Nast.

50:42And there started to create this idea of what a fashion photograph is, both highly romantic, pictorialist, very, very romantic, akin to painting, etc., etc., etc., but that's a different story. To wind on 25 years from that, you really haven't got to a modern definition where are we 1915 1925 1935 you know you're dealing with people like munkasky and you know hoonigan hune or you know um george platt lines uh horst you know they're the sort of gentleman photographers of the 40s and early 50s but it doesn't look like fashion photography now their models are still and they're posed and they're you know, Hoytie, et cetera, et cetera, and they're beautiful.

51:30But, you know, it's not until you get Avedon and Penn and then, you know, Bailey and Newton and Dordaun, you get a sort of contemporary dialogue of what a fashion photograph should be. So we've spent 25 years trying to understand what the hell fashion film should be, so I'm not too bothered. It gets us to a point, but it's not really, you know, it'll keep on dividing itself, and it defines itself partly within the medium. sorry i'll try to be quick um the medium fashion photography was magazines the medium for fashion film has been the internet but of course that manifests itself in different ways we started show studio and that was a good medium but you know we had um instagram came along and first of all instagram didn't carry film and then it carried 15 seconds worth of film you could put on instagram so fashion films became 15 seconds long it was about the right length um and then now instagram you can put 90 seconds on them and then you've got tiktok and then you've got youtube and youtube you've got hours on and so fashion films started getting different lengths again you know so i did the ones i did for john galliano when he was up margiela during covid were 45 minutes long so yeah what i did for gareth pew were about the same length so they started spilling out into these long kind of and how do you keep your audience because one of the most boring things in the world is a fashion film that's bad yeah it's so true and it's often to do with music um so you've got to keep your audience on the edge of their seat for 45 minutes showing them fashion and you know so we tried that if we tried um i'm now the conclusion it's about you know 10 seconds they're very difficult to make fashion films for sort of a multitude of reasons but when they're good they're absolutely amazing I was watching Sleep your first live stream event of models asleep and I wondered how you decided who would be most interesting asleep and like there's all these different amazing girls and in one of the clips her wig comes off and just sort of, it's, I thought I really enjoyed that.

53:48How did that happen? Well, one of the things the internet provided was quite a few things, which was quite radically different from magazine world. One of them was live broadcasting. And we started Shows Studio in 2000. So that's before TikTok, before Instagram, before Facebook, before YouTube. It was pretty basic at the time. And I don't know why we were so convinced we'd be able to do with it what eventually we could. But right back in 2000, the only way you could live stream was to live stream a single webcam image. So like you have here, we had a camera over the bed and we put, for sleep, and so you could stream one single frame out every minute.

54:30And so for sleep, we asked, I think it was five models in the course of two nights, so 10 models in all. And the Metropolitan gave us a floor of the hotel room. and we styled these models up so they're like super styled up and you know mcqueen and you know all the kind of great fashion of time fox and simon foxton did it and i think uh uh sydoney from mcqueen did it and johnson case a great stylist we styled these girls up we did the hair and the makeup and then we just put them on a bed just like i'm like to bed and said to them okay now go to sleep and we obviously it was obviously it was kind of nighttime so it was appropriate for and they go to sleep and then they just fell asleep but of course in your sleep you move around and of course you're wearing a kind of dress it sort of bunches up and they weren't comfortable and then they can't do that and knock as you said knock the wig off yeah you know i think liberty ross has had a short whip that she was sleeping with short crop and then one girl had to get up at five o 'clock in the morning so she wrote i think in lipstick on the bed sheets and you know goodbye um so it became these little fragments like but that's one still image going out every minute so it's sort of like a photograph going out of an unconscious performance and uh it was very when i first thought of doing it i thought it would be quite mutiny quite helmet mutiny and quite viristic quite boudin-esque um i was a bit concerned about that because i was i've always been slightly dubious about sexuality and and my work yeah about letting sexuality into my work so that's why yoji was so perfect so i've always been a bit kind of because i grew up in the 1970s by the end of 1970s the idea of the sort of lothario photographer was comedic to say the least yeah so it was a sort of you know the subject of carry-on films of kind of the sort of lusty photographer who was using his his his photography to bed young women you know post Bailey I mean it all became so tawdry and cliched etc etc etc so going back to sleep um as it were um I thought that it would be a bit hellman you need a bit kind of creepy and viristic and actually they were like pre-raphelite painting yeah it was very beautiful and because they were on a real piece of lo-fi equipment because it was on the crappy webcams that which was sort of so lo-fi at the time she just couldn't stream much data out and they were beautiful and an assistant of mine fantastic girl called ruth hogman who was one of the inventors of fashion film would be um she asked for a leaving present of a print from sleep and we did her a sort of three meter big print of one of the people one of the girls from sleep and it was beautiful it was like a Klimt.

57:16It was so painterly. There's such gloriousness in lo-fi because lo-fi shows you the mistakes. And because Show Studio has never had any money to speak of, we've always had to do things for nothing. And so whether it was a sort of security camera that we had to use as our camera or whatever, it was always make doing men. It was always Blue Peter. It was always kind of, but that forces you to be creative. So the sleep thing was these kind of really cheap webcams, A, the only ones we can get, B, or we can stream out at the time. But the quality of the lo-fi is because there's something about being able to see through the cracks in life, to be able to see to something better.

58:01And I've always thought that your work starts to show you the cracks. And the more failure that is in your work, the more you don't achieve what you think you want to achieve, the more it goes wrong. I'm a great believer in failure and chaos in work. So when you start trying to take a photograph of somebody, it's never what you think. And of course, I used to work on a 10x8 camera, so we'd pin up the Polaroids on the wall, and now I work like most other photographers with a screen so people can see. And I love the fact that people can see what you're doing. So if you're photographing somebody, the first shot you take of them is never very good, nearly always.

58:40And so you go through this humbling failure. so you're photographing people and my desire when i photograph somebody is to make them look the best i could ever imagine them looking to make them look the most handsome most beautiful most aspiring whatever it is you want to create the best picture of them and the first picture that comes out the camera is normally rubbish um and they look awful because even the makeup's wrong the lighting's wrong the hair's wrong the styling's wrong or i'm wrong um but it's quite humbling the fact that you have to stand in front of somebody you really care about whether it's Cindy Crawford or Robert De Niro and you have to show them a picture that you've taken of them which is shit or crap or not very good or just embarrassing or you wish you hadn't all those sorts of things but that forces you to try and go deeper yeah try and find more and it's in so doing that you sort of my modus operandi is to start off by failing in a way and I wish I didn't have to i wish i was a genius and could just go from you know hello nice to meet you sit in front of my camera to brilliant photograph but to get anywhere near a brilliant photograph you have to go through hell yeah and it's that old training from mark ascoli that forces me to do that but it's in so doing that you see things you didn't think you were going to see and you're not trying to see what's in front of you in any case you're trying to see what you can't physically see yeah You're trying to see your desire.

1:00:09You're trying to see with intuition, perception, and all those sort of emotions that we're not really trained to use. So you never want to photograph what you can see. You need to photograph what you can feel, what you want to see. You're never taking a photograph of what's in front of you. You're taking a photograph of what you hope to see. So that sort of, if you want, it's not a desperate attempt because that would be the wrong move, But it's a deep searching to try and find an image which is good that you haven't seen before, which forces you to see through the cracks, forces you to grasp at things which you think little sparks, little glimmers of light.

1:00:50You think, yes, there's something there. And you follow that and you try and get to that. And it isn't a solitary pastime. I have Sam McKnight behind me going, yeah, it's great. Or Val Garland going, that's fantastic. Or Marc Ascoli going, pardon, merci. Or whatever it is. Yeah. But you have people around you, and that team, that collaboration, whether it's Lee McQueen or John Galliano or Gaga or whoever it is, that coming together, that working together is all really important in it. It isn't a solitary pastime where you walk into a room, stand in front of somebody, click the button, and it's done.

1:01:28The only time that's ever happened to me is with a picture of Bjork. with alexander queen yeah where it was for the cover of homogenic and um lee came to the session and bjork walked in and was that the one with her lips those tiny lips and yeah and the and the amazing spiral all that it's the it's the homogenic cover um which is was literally the first shot so she's stood in front of the camera lee's next to me and i was working on a 10x8 camera so you put a sheet of film in you go click take the sheet of film out put a sheet of polaroid in go click uh so don't move in between and then you show people the sheet of polaroid lee saw the power and go right i got it we're going by left my god literally one shot and he walked out so we got it didn't see any he said bye to bjork bye to me off he went and bjork and i were kind of like um well we're all here and dressed up so we might as well try so we went on and on and on I worked for about three and a half hours with her to try and get a shot that was better and didn't achieve it.

1:02:39And that was partly the brilliance of Alexander McQueen. Yeah. That he could see things we couldn't see. He was already so in advance of seeing the image that wasn't in front of us. He just knew straight away. So that's the only time where, yes, I walked behind the camera, go and click, I'd got the image, and that was it. Apart from, of course, I didn't trust it. and I spent hours, three hours or so, trying to get a better image but not managing. And there is also something, I don't go too deep into psychology because I don't know where I'm going to go with it, but there is something spontaneous.

1:03:13You know, work in a medium which is about spontaneity. It's about your initial reaction to a scene. And sometimes, especially if you're working in a reportage, or, you know, I was doing skinhead, where you didn't have time to think. You literally just had to point and press and hope. so there's something instinctive there's something in the grasping everything in a split second there's something in that which goes against all of that reworking, diving back into it trying to see the glimmer of light so there are different ways of working it so I'm 66, I've been doing since I was 18, 17 18, I've still no idea how to take a good photograph other than just pushing yourself through the pain every time and the uncertainty and the doubts and the worry and all that sort of stuff.

1:04:00I'm just as nervous today before I take a photograph as I was when I first started, probably more so. I think those nerves are signs of life, aren't they? Because whenever I find myself nervous, which is always, especially like, you know, before this or, you know, when something matters, and then I remember, God, it would be so much worse if I wasn't nervous. I'd have just drifted into complacency and that description of, you know, going through the failure. And I suppose your subject is also part of that. You know, the bar is raised for them, too, to participate, collaborate with you in giving everything.

1:04:44And I remember when I'd sit for my dad and occasionally things would go wrong. And really, you know, there was nothing I could do except for I could will myself to be... to offer something and I think that counts for a lot too everyone involved is just invested in this outcome of this outcome of this outcome of this outcome of this outcome of this outcome of this is a lot of this career. The thing I particularly remember is the story you did for Dazed and Confused with Amy Mullins, the Paralympic athlete on the cover and showing her custom made artificial legs. And you said that Lee would come to you with amazing ideas and that were often quite dark.

1:05:42And you seem to have a talent for capturing the deep feeling in those ideas, but without fetishizing the darkness and i wondered whether there was ever a conflict between you about that aspect no i like the idea that all the poetic idea that i brought light into lee's darkness but i think it's probably far from the truth but i like the idea of it um fascinating what you're saying about working with your father i guess that side of things where the sitter becomes so important part of the creative process is i guess what i'm talking about the whole idea of a team um and how important all that energy is and then the teams on the photographic shoot i mean it boils down to hairdresser makeup artist stylist and art director so it's about four or five people is that chemistry is so important it's really important what hairdresser you have people are very dismissive of that yeah it's one of the things hard i will answer your question i promise um one of the hard things when you cross over from fashion photography to fashion film you're dealing with film world people in film aren't used to that they're not used to the fashion hierarchy you know when you're on a film set and when i first started doing fashion films obviously i used the same teams had mcknight and val and eugene and you know the people i work with but the film people just didn't know who they were and hair and makeup on a film is it doesn't have the same thing you don't you know because the way I work when I'm taking photographs Sam's in there every split second you know I'm taking pictures between Sam's hands or you know between the stylist Katie England you know between her sort of fluffing the collar but for film they don't get that they also don't see models they see them as as actors with no words so it's kind of like extras and so they don't get a hierarchy i've never understood i won't never interrupt the shot would they i mean on a film the hairdresser would never jump into the shot and fix that it's so important when you're creating an image and sam's i don't think he's a god but yeah you know those those people like eugene and sam they're such masters you know and val and pat and you You know, Issa Maher, they're great.

1:08:01They're as important as McQueen and Gaga. Hey, whatever. You asked me, I'll try and answer your questions rather than go off in tangents. I never felt conflict with myself and Lee. Never. I felt that he did have ideas which weren't very workable at times, practically. sometimes his ideas are a bit not so much dark it's difficult the first time I worked with him he worked for the Florence Biennale it's on a set of images it's Venice or the Florence Biennale I can't remember what it was and one of the images he wanted to do he said to me Nick I want to have this girl and she's floating in raw sewage and I wrote a photograph of her floating in raw sewage I was like Lee you can't you can't just put a model in raw sewage and charlotte's like oh god you can't just photograph a girl lying in raw sewage and lee thought for a bit oh right and he said all right sump oil i want a floating in sump oil and charlotte was like lee you can't put a human being in sump oil um because it'll grow their skin so there were ideas like that which he didn't really see part i mean i don't know how he would have survived in today's world but the writers like that were dark but they were just impractical more than they were sinister because he said in some of the things i was looking at he said he brought you his psychotic brain and you brought him pure professionalism and it was such a gorgeous it was just perfection it was such a joy to work in the way a nightmare can be a joy um it wasn't ever a nightmare that's not at all I shouldn't have really said it because it's not really at all how I felt but it was such a journey and he was like Mark Ascoli that he wouldn't be happy easily yeah he'd push he'd really really push he said this other wonderful thing where he said there's that photograph with his head exploding sort of on fire and exploding and he said that he wanted he thought well anger could be in a picture rather than smacking someone in the face.

1:10:18Yeah. It was so touching. There's something, there's some, we were similar in something. There was something between Lee and I which was similar. He would ask, he'd describe things, like we did the picture which is called Blade of Light, which was the idea of what looks like sort of a comet hitting a set of models and throwing them up into the sky and it's sort of you know it's passing through them and his idea he came to me with that was i want to photograph um as if a bus hits a bus queue of people i was like holy no no no you can't do that and so yeah i'd say that to him and then he'd say well how about then quite crossly how about then if it's a comet hitting a group of people.

1:11:11I think, yeah, that'll work. We can work with that. So often it was just a recalibration of how we'd express the idea rather than the actual essence of the idea. In the end, the picture, which was supposed to be in raw sewage, we did in molasses. We decided to photograph the poor girl lying in molasses. Molasses is like marmite. I mean, it's really thick, brown, heavy, sticky, viscous. It's really not very nice substance quite interesting actually, but not very nice And we put this girl got a huge Like a swimming pool. Yeah, it's like, you know, you can inflate in the studio filled a foot half deep of Pure molasses cover how many gallons we poured into this thing and then we put the girl in it Sitting on top of it.

1:11:59So push the girl into it. She's wearing a gray suit, but then nothing happens you just see less of the suit it's under the molasses and you can't see it she's actually the picture was not very good um because it's actually it's not you imagine it to be better it sounds much better than it was it was just a sheet of shiny um black very dark brown reflective material and once the girl went into it because you can't see through it you just lost it so some of the ideas just didn't work so it sounds like such a revelation lying in a pool of molasses but it's interesting to find that it isn't that interesting the process was much more interesting getting it in and getting it out was quite a process yeah i was it's just like there's something in digital photography called the clipping plane which um people who study tech will know what I'm talking about, where when you create a 3D avatar of somebody and when it goes outside of the data wall, if you will.

1:13:02And I try to explain it in layman's terms, I don't even know in professional terms. But you get what's called a clip and they just disappear. It was a bit like you had a clipping plane on her. She'd just disappeared. There's no more information under the molasses. Trying to get her out was quite a problem because it was quite hard getting her in. But once she'd been in there for a while, it was quite hard getting her out. And I thought, oh, it'll make a brilliant picture, her covered in molasses. is no you didn't get a picture didn't get a good picture anyway anyway anyway yeah because um one of the pictures of yours that i became obsessed with was the photograph of devon naoki with wearing mcqueen and her eyes filled with black and i i remember i can remember the moment where i was sitting when i saw that picture was the cover the independent um and i became I it was so affecting and when you said it a fashion photograph can rarely make you cry but sometimes it can just have this seismic effect that you realize you just have to live more intensely or be more aware or just get further in you know not to the molasses but into it but and what are the qualities in a model that you look for because it was such a powerful, such a beautiful photograph?

1:14:26I think you have to see beauty in them. That doesn't mean they have to be beautiful but you have to see beauty in them and as I'm sure you know as much as I do that beauty manifests in so many different ways. Because, you know, we talked about, you know, is it in the texture of the skin or the way somebody moves or how they speak or, you know, it's so much more than just the physicality of people. When you're photographing somebody, you need to find them beautiful. And you need to be interested in them. Yeah. How can you do anything profound if you don't care about the person in front of your camera or if you don't care about the clothes they're wearing?

1:15:14That's why I only really want to work with designers that I love and I admire. And that's because I don't know, if I was working with somebody whose clothes I didn't admire, I don't know how I could make an honest picture. So you have to. But it's not a problem. There are amazing, lots of amazing fashion designers. Of course, life is very, you know, what's fascinating about life is how the opposites. So, you know, I fell in love with Yoji and I fell in love with the whole of the idea of his vision of women. And at the time, I wasn't excited by the Mugler's or the Versace's. But now with a different head on or a different attitude or a different, just trying to see the opposite.

1:15:59Fascinating, incredible clothes. You know, some Mugler's clothes are just incredible. So you just need to find somebody you are fascinated by, interested in, somebody you desire, not in an obvious way, but somebody you sort of want to know more about. They send you into a kind of, I mean, you can imagine somebody's life and their thoughts, and you become obsessed. Yeah. Not in a stalker weird way, but just kind of, because it's amazing. Devon was amazing. Everything that she looked like, it was amazing. If you looked at her, she just sends you off into kind of so many visions, you know. It's the same with all those great, great models, you know, Kate or all the ones that we know.

1:16:47Yeah. But then I also photograph people a lot who aren't professional models, people who I see in the street or more frequently now on Instagram who I find absolutely fascinating. one of the joys of me for Instagram is finding people who I think are physically amazing how they look and so I will write to them on Instagram I'll direct message them, I'll say hi, I'm Nick Knight I'm a photographer, blah blah blah just want to say I think you look amazing, I would love to photograph you most of the time they'll write back it's a nice thing there's a girl at the moment who's in Kazakhstan. Yeah. But I can't get her out of Kazakhstan.

1:17:34So, but she's incredible looking. She's really incredible looking. She's a vision of, you know, what is a human for? I just find it fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I remember the first time I photographed Gemma Ward. Oh, God, she was amazing. When she walked on stage, and one she'd opened for Prada, I think, and then I'd photographed her for W Magazine or something. And when she walked onto set, I was absolutely just blown away. I mean, she looked so alien. She looked like a different form of life, different life form. Oh, God. And I remember thinking, she just looked like no other I've ever seen.

1:18:17So inspiring. So, you know, that's when you become obsessed. Yeah. And you become obsessed. You want to photograph her again and again and again. But I keep finding that. It's not like it happens rarely. My problem is it happens all too frequently. My life is full of people I want to photograph and I want to work with because I find them exciting. There's a whole range of people. I just have this desire to work with them, to photograph, film them, work with them, make sculptures of them now. Because now I make sculptures. I 3D scan people and of course can print out a sculpture of them. and so that's become my thing you know i'm obsessed with now because not just the fact you make a 3d sculpture but what's it made out of and so i'm i'm thinking all these different materials i did a as a girl i photographed quite a lot called tessa karagi wonderful wonderful person who's a psychiatrist actually um anyway she became pregnant and um i photographed her when she was nine months pregnant.

1:19:21So a very big tummy. And then I made a sculpture of her. I photographed her lying back and did a 3D scan of her and a sculpture of it. But I took out the sort of sphere, if you want, of her pregnancy and replaced that. I printed out a small version of her as a small sculpture and replaced the pregnancy with a broken egg. So I got a fresh egg and I broke it into the sort of concave part of her tummy after having taken out the kind of sphere of the pregnancy. And it's beautiful. because then the white of the egg runs across her and the yolk is sort of bulbous and straining to break because it's just about able to hold the yolk in it.

1:20:01So working with sculptures, I think, are fascinating. I'm trying to make one after soap at the moment. I'm working with somebody who I want to make a life-size sculpture in soap and then put next to the sculpture a washbasin so that people come and see it can wet their hands and then run their hands across the life-size version of this person. Because, of course, when we go to the museums, whether it's MoMA or V &A or wherever, you're not allowed to touch the sculptures. But, of course, for the sculptor, that was all of it. For Brancusi, it was the touch. So I'm very into the materiality of the sculptures as much as the form of the sculptures because it opens up a whole range of sensory things which I haven't previously been able to engage with.

1:20:53Something weird about being a photographer, especially digital photography, if you want to call it that, is a very dry medium. With a lot of mediums, you can become tactilely involved with your art. So if you're a painter, you can be covered in paint and turpentine and whatever else it is. A sculptor, you can be covered in marble dust or bits of metal or it's very physical um a photographer it's click click click that's it it's very frustrating yeah and i'm actually not somebody who likes being covered in stuff because i was painting at the weekend because i was whatever it is but i was doing something weekend which meant i had to paint um doing something at show studio and i actually wasn't i was thinking about this thought i've had a long time about the tactility of our art and how I find a photographer who's frustrated because it's not tactile.

1:21:48And everyone's covered in white and Martian paint. They go, I've got bloody stuff on my hands. I hate it. Which is kind of, you know, a bit counterproductive if I'm going to go into more tactile media. But there is something I think that we miss as photographers in the tactility of our art form. And with clothes, if you fancy someone and you don't like what they're wearing, does it kill your attraction to them? I think if somebody dresses in a way which I wouldn't expect, I find it more fascinating. I never presume that I know more than the person in front of me. So somebody dressed in a way, because one's of a certain age, I'm 66, so I've been in and out of different fashion trends over the years.

1:22:33The things that you take as kind of things that everybody thinks is a bad taste and you kind of all agree about saying it's a bad taste, all of a sudden they're very like what everybody's wearing and the height of fashion. And so you have to recalibrate, you know, things like the mullet, for instance, as a hairstyle, which, you know, in the 1970s, all the footballers had mullets and then they were not de rigueur in fashion for a long time. And then my son had a mullet and he looks gorgeous. And I'm thinking, oh, I have to see that again. I have to re-understand that. So I would never presume if I'm faced by somebody who is dressed in a way that I wouldn't necessarily find attractive just if I thought about it I would never presume that I was right and they were wrong I always presumed they know more than me yeah and so I wouldn't I don't think I'd approach it in that way um and I just I find the discovery of things I don't know what really which is the something is the thing that I really so when somebody does something I don't understand I'm more if you're not attracted or interested to them yeah because i don't understand what they do yeah and so i want to understand that i want to try and sort of get in their head so that's more how we'd see yeah and you described john galliano as being a mozart or leonardo and such a beautiful description and i was i was watching your film of him swalk um when he was creating the tango collection at margella and he has so many ideas happening and all at the same time and i i wondered how you describe how did you decide which thread to follow to keep the the viewer on the narrative tricky um in those swalk films which are two i think the tango swog two yeah um uh they're both after saying that fashion film shouldn't have a narrative i had to then eat my words and create a narrative yeah and so we hired a writer to actually give us a narrative which to thread in and out thing so for all intents and purposes what you're seeing because it was those they were done during covid those films because it wasn't really an easy way for him to do a show so inside he wouldn't do a film and john who is notoriously very shy as a person and very secretive and will only open up to his sort of entourage or his people who he trusts around him, was incredibly brave and opened up completely on camera.

1:25:12So we would do Zoom calls where he would talk completely openly about his process and about what he was doing, about what he was feeling. And he got everybody in his atelier to wear a webcam, including his dog. So everybody was wearing a webcam. So it was total showing the process. And then in amongst that, he's creating this collection from desires and references that he wants to do. And at the end of it, I was filming the collection, trying to bring it to life. But then throughout this process, which is already quite, not convoluted, but quite complex and quite layered, we've tried to weave this narrative through.

1:25:51We send people sort of realized as they were watching it that things were happening for a reason. Great narratives, really fun thing. but like a real narrative film. Yes, that's what I say. I believe that fashion films should not have a narrative. So I made two narrative films. In a way, you have to work in opposites. Yeah. You know, it's like I said, I don't think, I don't presume that I'm right and the other person is wrong or I presume there's another way of doing it. And John is so wonderfully educated. And yes, he's our, culturally, he's our Mozart. He's our Da Vinci. are you know so was lee you know they are huge cultural icons whose work of which will will occupy the same cultural space that those musicians as composers um their their space occupies in our sort of understanding of culture i mean there were moments in that film that were so disarming and so so moving just the there was some sort of organizational frames and then suddenly there was these two figures in the atelier dancing down the piece of the piece of carpet or whatever with their faces covered in tulle and I felt I did feel like I wanted to cry for it was just so beyond what anything I could imagine and John's sort of incredible ability to create elegance like when he was talking about putting these Mary Janes on a man and they were so tough and they were so macho and this these gestures and how proportioned suddenly everyone had these amazing proportions that he just he spun a web that you saw things how he had them in his head.

1:27:49And it was really well captured. I mean, I am big into a narrative, and I think even with those tiny fashion films that I've watched of yours, they're effective because they feel like a story, even though there may not be a beginning, middle and end. There's a feeling of something happening. i mean it's i what i'm trying to make is the equivalent of what motown was in the 60s for me motown as it was described was a hit factory yeah so those hits that came out from supremes marvin gay and all those fantastic singers who i love um it was a hit factory and just as you'll say those those songs you know heard it through great vinyl you know the the countless brilliant hits that came out of Motown, of course they had enormous depth to them and enormous passion to them, but they were a hit factor.

1:28:47You just had to hear them again and again and again. What I'm questing for is fashion films that you want to watch again and again and again. And that's where my feeling is at the moment. And that's why I'm thinking the narrative's in the clothes. Don't put a narrative on top of that. Just let the narrative, the clothes do the talking, just like it does in the fashion photograph yeah yeah liberate that put it with a great soundtrack and now the great thing is because we thought we were really caught because to get a great soundtrack is no more easy than getting a great visual but now instagram will allow you to put 90 seconds of anybody's sound or the rolling stones or the beatles or marvin gay or whatever else onto your uh you know little film or your pictures so now all this wonderful music is suddenly available whether it's you know beautiful jazz or whether it's kind of incredible soul or you know all these things are fantastic classical music it's just so rich and so we can do that now but that's as long as it lives on on instagram but that's a different different set of uh values or a different set of constraints if you want and in your pictures you play a lot with scale and proportion you talked about the 3d the sculptures and the 3d sculptures and do you find there's ever a proportion that just totally freezes you either in a person if you're photographing them is there something that is a big hurdle to overcome i don't think so bella i don't think so i mean i i've heard such a range of people you know when we're doing you talked earlier about the fashion able series we did of people with quite strong physical differences in their bodies so people who were born without legs or with spina bifida or thalidomide or um all those who've got very very different body shapes I remember before that story and we were photographing people who said whose mothers had taken the drug flidamide so Alison Lapper was one his bodies are completely different completely different to ours to I guess what you would see most times but they're people and the body wasn't the thing and I remember thinking to myself before I went on to the session how I'm going to fuck this up how could i i know i'm gonna offer my hand to shake their hand and they weren't gonna have it's gonna be i know i'm gonna fuck up and of course you don't because it's not about the physical it's about the person it's about humanity in the person and that's the thing that you contact with and that's the thing you photograph you know and it's all whatever shape the body is it's fascinating yeah you know so i don't really have that i mean yeah it's very easy because a lot of clothes are designed to fit on a certain body so yes that body shape is you know so it's long etiolated long neck and you know it's a 1950s kind of you know um Lisa Fonson Greaves pen version of beauty but then you've got the Kim Kardashian version of beauty you know with a tiny waist and big bust and you know big posterior which is equally as fascinating yeah it's beautiful And I remember so clearly when Ye said to me, I'm going to introduce you to my girl.

1:32:19And it was Kim, the new O2 Arena backstage. And I met Kim and she was perfectly lovely. And I remember the hostility that was raged against my postings of Kim when I was photographing Kim when she first started on the scene. And still to some degree now. um i just thought that's that's feels so wrong to me yeah well just prejudice against her in the way shape in the way that kate had so much prejudice against her what's this girl done to outrage you all yeah you know does she stand for values that you don't stand for is that such a even people who I respect enormously, you know, certain journalists and things, was so rude to me about Kim.

1:33:08I just started thinking, I really take people how I find them. And this woman has been nothing but kind and well-educated and well-mannered and charming and, you know, for all intents of hardworking and considerate. And so where's the problem here? I've got much less considerate people, much less education, much less kind, much less, you know, I don't know. I think people bring so much, I don't know, unnecessary hate to things. Yeah. I find it really, really strange. And there's a laziness in a sort of knee-jerk kind of prejudice like that, just a lack of imagination. and that shows up quite a lot in people, in attitudes to fashion.

1:34:03Women's shape changed culturally with Kim. I mean, I could argue where the shape came from, etc., etc., but that's not really the point. The point is, culturally, it had a huge impact. And I remember talking to a lecturer, he was central to St. Martins, and talking to him about what the students were into. And this was just when Kim was first appearing on the screen. and the lecturer said to me, my students are all absolutely obsessed with her. Obsessed. They don't want to know about the fashion models. They don't want to know about her. They all want to look like her. So it's that thing, you know, it's that sort of cultural thing that becomes so kind of, you know, I don't know, it's just so important.

1:34:50I find it hard that people get so stuck in their opinions that they can't change because life's much more fascinating if you change your opinions, you try and see things in a different way and try and understand things in a different way anyway. And you mentioned about your dad being a psychologist in these military organisations. Yes. Was that top secret or did he tell you anything or what was he looking for? I don't know exactly what he did. I slightly romanticised his job because I didn't know much about it not because he was remote he was an incredibly loving father both my parents were incredibly loving they had their own ways of being as I said they were from a different generation

1:35:47but we didn't talk to him he didn't have see I've thought about this a lot obviously because he's my dad um but he didn't practice his work on me as far as i knew so there was no sort of you know i didn't feel the presence of his psychology in my life until i realized quite a while after he died that maybe he did when i was born i was born in 1958 it's a long time ago now i may but at the time the the prevalent psychological theory was that of a psychologist who i hate called skin i didn't i hate i don't know them there's somebody i don't understand called skinner skinnerian psychology was very much the idea that you could bring up children without physical affection you could bring up children without love put them in a cage they'll be fine don't bother it wasn't exactly that but it's going towards that so i remember this one of the few conversations i had with my dad about psychology he said that he'd looked at skinner and dismissed it um but then my parents brought me up without discipline so they believed i think this came mainly from my dad because i think my mother was secretly more disciplinarian but they brought chris my brother and i up without discipline so they said you will learn by experience you will learn by doing things if you we won't insist that you sit at table with us sit on the table if you want but you'll learn you'll learn quite quickly that most interesting things are happening above the table so you'll sit back up at the table so they never they certainly never physically disciplined me that was the plan the life doesn't work out exactly that way but the The idea was that I was brought up about discipline, so I was allowed to do whatever I wanted because I would learn nature's boundaries would assert themselves.

1:37:48However, what appeared at the time when I was a young teenager to be brilliant, but I can swear in front of my parents or do whatever I want, I then started this creeping feeling that it was neglect. and it was actually should they not have put some boundaries in place because they might have brought me out about discipline but it doesn't mean school had no discipline yeah it doesn't mean there wasn't law and it doesn't mean there wasn't the law of the street and there wasn't the law of the land um so i quickly having no disciplinary walls in my family quickly went outside those to find the things that would stop me doing stuff so I quickly came up against you know a range of different things should we say abstractly that would stop me behaving the ways I was behaving so I did look back at that and think was that part of some psychological experiment to try and bring up your children without discipline and of course it all went wrong because we did we came off the rails yeah um probably I came off the rails a bit more profoundly than my brother actually I think the firstborn always has a harder time the second born is in this slightly sort of calm oasis of well he's done it so i can do twice as much so i think it came off the rails in my early teens um and it got very disciplinarian for a while at home at home yeah that psychology was not really not applied in the same way so i mean without going into it too much my dad burnt all my clothes to stop me going out so gosh he's so cross in me and my behavior so the way to control me was to burn everything i had to burn other than my gorgeous school uniform so when you're sort of 14 the idea that the only way you're going to go out is by putting on this vile green blazer um that kept you at home so um quite extreme in that way yeah my father who never had lifted a finger towards me beat me up so it was a bit of shock it just happened to once yeah and i was like so shocked by the whole it really rooted me and took me off the path i was going now which wasn't a great path about you needing to know anybody else need to know any details it wasn't a great path it wasn't going and we're great um so it did re abruptly very abruptly abruptly sorry put me back onto a path yeah and that's where i think i started on the path which I'm still on um it's not totally coherent but it feels like the same vibe if you want yeah yeah um I'm quite Charlotte and I my wife and I are quite different in terms of how we live our lives um she's much more free form and I'm much more sort of ordered if you want yeah um i see it as a pleasure um but um i think other people would call it an issue um but i like things in straight lines and i like things better order because i can think better that way so the house is a total mess um i can't really think very easily um but i've had three children so the house has been a total mess um and that was fine i just had to indulge it but i take quite a lot of just simple joy in arranging things in neat lines just simple joy no no i have no worry about it no there's no um psychosis there or no uh doesn't impinge on my on my well-being and my behavior um but i think that's i heard a rumor that you had a pantone color for your shape for how you like your tea i actually thought that was a really good idea it's a really good idea it's actually charlotte not me because i can't drink tea it sounds like such a good rumor to go with it's a good room you're brilliant there's a room around that i have an umbrella to match each suit i have um which is true um and they're all different shades i mean i have a lot of suits a lot of suits and of course i know the difference between mid-gray nine and mid-gray 10 today we're being we are wearing mid-gray 10 um i would never wear light grey um to an interview like this i never wear dark grey um i have a whole range of little tiny details that nobody else knows nobody else cares about more importantly which i quite enjoy so although i dress the same every day or virtually every day it's in the detail that i get my pleasure um and it's you know the collar moving a centimeter higher or lower or you know those little tiny details that as i say nobody else should know or will want to know or cares about but I do and those sort of little details I find fascinating and the harmony that I get by arranging things so I guess what I'm trying to do I take a photograph I'm making a composition when I have a camera that I'm looking through or working with I'm composing and I'm making what I would term as melodic constructions or melodic compositions so I think very much in terms of music and when i was when i'm photographing i'm looking for that harmony that melodic harmony that note that i'm looking for in my head which is through arrangement of things and so because i describe it so much in terms of sound so melody harmony note etc which is other words that come naturally when i'm trying to describe my own process i think i'm probably scenesthetic which is where you mix up you know you taste color or you see sound or whatever yeah um so i think i probably have some cedar caesia knocking around within me um which i find utterly fascinating i get very fascinated by all those things which we don't understand about ourselves dyslexia cene caesia dyspraxia all those sort of things i think it's what i can't remember who said they were superpowers but they probably are um so all those sorts of things i find really exciting So my pleasure I get from composing my environment, which is a sort of lost battle, really, because the environment doesn't stay composed.

1:44:00But I imagine it composed, and that gives me a certain amount of pleasure. But it's not that I get stress, displeasure, anxiety, or anything negative from it not being in that way. It's just I'd rather it was. but as I said having the three wonderful kids who we don't have any art up in our house because it's not how I want to have any art I have I put in my house in Corwell because that's a different situation or I put it in a show studio because that's a different situation but in my house I don't put anything on the walls other than my children's paintings for when they were tiny and they would just draw them and put them all around the house because I thought it was joyous.

1:44:45So I don't get displeasure in that way from lack of order or chaos. I just get pleasure from order and putting things in rows and all that sort of stuff. But it's probably quite short-lived and not very... But there's something nice in the harmony of that. Well, it seems to have an incredible result and it brings so much joy and pleasure to all of us, your admirers. and thank you so much, Nick. Well, it's been lovely speaking to you. I hope it's been interesting to listen to. It has been totally riveting. Thank you so much. Well, it's absolutely my pleasure, Bara. Thank you. Thank you.

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