The legendary photographer pens an essay for GREATEST 09 detailing his journey from 1985 i-D Magazine shoots to experiments with 3D avatars in 2024.

Legendary photographer Nick Knight pens an essay for GREATEST 09 detailing his journey from 1985 i-D Magazine shoots to experiments with 3D avatars in 2024.

“Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.” &nbsp;
—Claude Monet

New Ways of Seeing by Nick Knight
I didn’t have an immediate affinity for photography, but it did give me a reason to be. In many ways it was a passport to life: having a camera gives you a purpose to go anywhere and to approach anyone. You don’t always get welcomed with open arms, but it’s my experience that 9 times out of every 10, people want to have their photograph taken. Maybe it’s simply that most people welcome the interest and enjoy the attention. 

I used fashion as a way of saying who I was, or at least to make people see me how I wanted them to, and therefore force their assumptions or indeed prejudices of who I was. 

Every adolescent needs a rite of passage and being a skinhead in the 1970s was mine. It was my provocation to the world I lived in. Looking back now I realize I wanted to feel like an outsider.

My journey into a new medium outside of the parameters of photography started with a shoot of 100 portraits for i-D Magazine in 1985. I shot them all on a Hasselblad so they were all square in format. However, the editor, Terry Jones, decided at the end of the shoot he actually wanted them as upright rectangles, not squares at all. I didn’t want to crop any of the images, so we stretched them vertically on a machine at the magazine’s printers called a Scitex. 
 
This fundamental change to the image didn’t have anything to do with photography at all. 

If you take away the received “wisdom” of the way things should be done, and instead just follow your desire, then you have some chance of actually getting some fulfillment in the discovery of something new in your image-making. It’s this approach I’ve taken throughout my whole career. 

At age 18, I abandoned my family’s plans for me to be a doctor and went straight from studying medical sciences to enrolling in a photography school, armed only with enthusiasm and spurred on with youthful arrogance, but with no preconceived notions of how you should create an image at all. 

I firmly rejected anything that had come before me and instead set out to create images in whatever way I could. Everything was intuitive. I wanted to learn by my own experience.

At the time, there wasn’t anything else you could call what I was doing but “photography.” 

I was discovering that I could start to take the life I saw around me and force it into the patterns, shapes and rhythms that I actually wanted to see. 

I tried everything. I would paint on my negatives with black ink, develop film in developer so hot it was almost boiling, purposely mix the wrong chemicals just to see what it did and use exposures that meant the camera shutter was open for over an hour on a single image. 

I was trying to find my path. 

The huge revelation came at the end of the 1980s when I discovered a machine called the Quantel Paintbox. It was the forerunner to what we all know now as Photoshop. A beautiful machine with which you could actually mix the colors on-screen as if they were digital paint! Once again it was really based on a post-production tool used in the film industry, but virtually no one was using it for photography—mainly because it was so incredibly expensive. 

Looking back on it now, the whole process of working with it still seems amazing. You were given an “operator” who would sit at a huge high-definition screen and carry out your instructions. Behind him there was an entire room full of exciting-looking tech, tended to by people in white lab coats. It could hardly have felt more sci-fi! 

Immediately, the Paintbox provided a range of things that were far outside anything you could attempt with conventional photography: dropping in completely different backgrounds, changing the model’s head from one shot to another, liquefying shapes just as if they were made of paint. What it could do seemed endless. It felt like having God in a box! 

This was the beginning of what mistakenly got called “digital photography.” A better name, I feel, would have been “digital image-making,” as it takes in all the aspects of the image revolution that was then underway. In any case, one thing was absolutely obvious: This was a totally new art form.&nbsp;

Then, almost as if it had been planned, in the mid-1990s the internet happened and this brand new art form suddenly had its own medium. Throughout the 20th century, photography had the magazine and the book as its platforms. I had a brand-new global platform whose amazing possibilities seemed immediately obvious to me. Thus in November of 2000, I started the fashion website SHOWstudio.com. 

A primary purpose of it was as the first platform for “fashion film,” the rightful successor to fashion photography. It seemed an obvious step. Every fashion designer creates their clothes to be seen in movement. Fashion photography, however great, had been a compromise of that vision. 

There were many reasons to start SHOWstudio, but one of the main ones was to explore innovative ways to conceive and create digital imagery. 

Livestreaming, audience participation, 3D scanning, AI and virtual reality were all new and all not possible in a magazine. 

The reason to have fashion at the core of SHOWstudio was in part my own love of it, fueled by some of the most exciting people I have met—Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Yohji Yamamoto, for example. But crucially fashion itself was about change, and it’s that energy and speed of change that felt right for a new medium that was fast unfolding in front of me.

A photograph is a singular moment in time, taken from one angle, one perspective; a monolinear relationship with the subject. Photography is also very different from sight. 

When you take a photograph it is shaped by what you have and are about to experience. Reality is experienced on a timeline. However, when you see a photograph it is totally divorced from the emotional timeline upon which it was originally taken on. 

Also, the physiology of the eye works by nonlinear scanning, finding points of interest and gathering peripheral information, and is never still. 

The things that form our experience of reality don’t exist at all in the way a camera takes a photograph. 

This realization made me convinced that photography was not very good at showing truth, and therefore should be as free of that burden as painting is. 

Nowadays, and simply using my phone, I can create sculptures through 3D scanning. In so doing, I need to consider how a person looks from all angles, much as a sculptor would have to. From a 3D scan, you can choose the angle you want to show the image from after the moment you do the actual scan. The much-talked-about “decisive moment” no longer exists. 

I find it interesting to be able to bring “photographic” ideas to sculpture, such as double exposures or blur.

I am creating avatars from my 3D scans of people, to which I add movement from motion-capture sessions. I add speech to the avatars, and most incredibly I can now program in their emotions too. It sounds all very sci-fi, but in essence I have been creating characters in my pictures throughout my whole career. 

My actual practice is also totally different to what it was just a few years ago. I often shoot “remotely,” my camera in a studio with the model on one side of the world whilst I am in my studio in London. I can see exactly what the camera does and at the touch of a key on my keypad, the camera takes the picture almost in real time, thousands of miles away.

Next step: a “virtual” me in a virtual space with a virtual model dressed in virtual clothes. 

I can’t help but feel that Man Ray, the great photographer and visual innovator of the 1930s, would be just as excited as I am by these possibilities! 

I’ve spent the last 40 years breaking away from an art form of photography into something new, something not yet even defined. Its parameters aren’t even yet visible. 

I’m interested in what you can’t see more than what you can, and my excitement is not always about pushing the frontiers simply of technology. The tech is a simple means to an end. I have always said that one should be no more interested in tech than one would be to discover what paintbrush Picasso used or chisel Rodin sculpted with! 

What interests me is finding new ways of seeing. It’s an innovation of approach rather than technology. I’m not happy doing the same thing on repeat. Once you have discovered something, there is little excitement in rediscovering it. 
 
That is what innovation is for me, doing things because you desire to, not because you think you should. 

I would also advise against trying to understand why you take images. Simply take them because you want to, to find out things you know nothing about, to see things you can’t see, as it’s only then you will see things you’ve never seen before.

Shop GREATEST 09 <a href="https://www.goat.com/collections/gr09" target="_blank">here</a> and discover the issue's cover stories, including <a href="https://www.goat.com/editorial/sub-design-studio-berlin-greatest-magazine">sub,</a> <a href="https://www.goat.com/editorial/yoon-ahn-kim-jones-interview-greatest-magazine" target="_blank">Yoon Ahn</a>, Peso Pluma and <a href="https://www.goat.com/editorial/tyshawn-jones-na-kel-smith-interview-greatest-magazine">Tyshawn Jones</a>.

GREATEST Magazine Issue 09 - sub

GREATEST Magazine Issue 09 - Yoon Ahn

GREATEST Magazine Issue 09 - Tyshawn Jones

GREATEST Magazine Issue 09 - Peso Pluma

Nick Knight: New Ways Of Seeing

From Balenciaga runway shows to Travis Scott album covers, a rare look inside the architectural think tank’s multidisciplinary works in GREATEST 09.

Founded in 2017 by Niklas Bildstein Zaar and Andrea Faraguna, Berlin studio sub’s relentless pursuit of meaning is redefining creativity in the design world.

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