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- [00:01]
Nick Knight
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it and they might not be as careful. That's why Lifelock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. They visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off. Terms apply at Capella University.
- [00:31]
Bella Freud
Learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success, like your enrollment specialist, who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve. You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program. Plus, career coaches are available to help you navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella. Edu Hi, come in. Welcome to Fashion Neurosis. Nick Knight.
- [01:18]
Nick Knight
Thank you, Bella. Very nice to be here.
- [01:22]
Bella Freud
Can I ask you what you're wearing today and why you chose these particular clothes?
- [01:28]
Nick Knight
I wear pretty much the same thing every day, depending on if I'm shooting or not shooting. I tend to wear single breasted suits a bit 1960s style, usually from Kilgar, from Savile Row. And I wear them with a pair of black trickers, black brogue trickers and a white shirt. My white shirts are from a shirt maker called Frank Foster. And Frank Foster became quite an important emotional part of my life, weirdly because I wear the man shirt every day. His real name was Lionel, but he came across to Britain from I think Russia during the sort of pogroms. Is it the sort of problems for the Jewish people? And some fled to England. A lot arrived in the East End of London turned last century. And Lionel or Frank Foster was one of them. And he was a, by his own account, a street fighter. He took on Mosley's black shirts in East End of London. And then he decided since the turn of the last century. So then he decided that, that he wanted to be an artist. And he started creating paintings, I think, and was going to show, in fact it might have even shown in Russia on one show with two other artists who sadly forget. But they're important artists that we would know. If I could remember their names, we'd recognize them. And then he decided after that he actually didn't want to be an artist. He felt that he wanted to do. I can't remember how he put it, but sort of not a serious job, but a proper job. And so he became a shirt maker back in the days where if you wanted a shirt, you had to go to a shirt maker. And so he became a shirt maker and he was actually quite good at it because he also, as a sort of byproduct of his shirt making, opened a club in South East London next to the club owned by the Cray twins. So I think we're starting to form a picture of Frank here. And he would. In the 60s, he was driving Aston Martin and he would drive through France and across the Alps and into Italy and. And buy the most beautiful Italian cloth sort of cloth you could only get one roll of, wasn't that. You could get lots of it. So he would buy these rare cloths and he became a shirt maker for all the stars of the 1960s and 70s. So anybody who was in film, anybody who was in photography, anybody who was in sport, he was the shirt maker. And he sadly died at the ripe of age of. In his early 90s. Just apparently just stopped living. Wasn't ill, but just stopped one morning. And I still have my shirts made at Frank Foster's and by his wife or his widow and his daughter. And the thing with Frank is when I first I met him, I went down to his place in Pall Mall and met him and it was an incredible little place. And there was Frank, who looked like Marlon Brando, Apocalypse Now. It was that kind of sort of beautiful but terrifying man. Not terrifying, but, yeah, certain. Had a certain. What should we put it? Presence. And he would be very cross me now because I haven't got my button done up properly on my shirt. So I'm really sorry, but he would. Sorry. He was just completely of a different time period. It was a bit like meeting somebody from a film. Every time you were down with him, it felt like you were in the scene from a film. So, yeah, every single day of my life, I wear a Frank Foster shirt. So it becomes important. And next to my bed, there is a picture of my wife, Charlotte, my three children, Cam, Ella and Emily. And there's another picture of Frank Foster. So that gives you some idea of how important emotionally he's become in my life.
- [05:32]
Bella Freud
And is it always a white shirt?
- [05:34]
Nick Knight
Never a color in public, it's always a white shirt. Never see me. You should never see me out in a shirt that is in white. I have actually got a whole array of beautiful. Everything going from a kind of pale, dusty pink all the way through to a dark sort of really? Almost like a dark denim blue, right up to a really pale blue. But I. I just. I think one needs a moment where one's not always on.
- [06:04]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [06:04]
Nick Knight
So you're not always being shown. You know, not all life should be served up as entertainment. Some stuff is just private.
- [06:10]
Bella Freud
Yeah, I suppose. It's like a container, isn't it? It's useful in that way.
- [06:16]
Nick Knight
Yeah, I guess. Also, I. I really. I really like fashion, which might come as no surprise as I'm a fashion photographer, but I really like it. And I've been dressing this way. Well, see what I shoot, it's slightly different because when you're photographing, you can't be wearing a Savile Rose suit, because as soon as you bend down, which you invariably do when you're taking a photograph or you lie down on the floor, they're always white studio floors, and you ruined your suit straight away. So I have a pair of jeans, a particular sort of jean, which is Levi's, 5050217, which is a sort of nothing jean. It has no real style to it. It's a sort of not particularly tapered, not flared, not, you know, not sort of bootleg. It's just a kind of nothing jean. So I wear that. I wear that with a pair of robes and a white shirt.
- [07:09]
Bella Freud
And do you always wear a black sock or does that ever vary?
- [07:12]
Nick Knight
I didn't used to wear socks at all because I liked the idea that I was wearing the most minimal clothing you could wear. So it'd be shoes, trousers and shirt. But then more recently, I started wearing black socks.
- [07:25]
Bella Freud
Yes. Yeah. In the world of fashion, photography and filmmaking, your name as an avant garde visionary is the most respected. And how. How early in your life did you notice you were drawn to the unusual over the conventional? And where did that come from?
- [07:45]
Nick Knight
I don't know if I've ever diagnosed it that way. I'm not sure I ever thought. I'm drawn to the unusual, because for me, it's not unusual, it's fascinating.
- [07:55]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [07:56]
Nick Knight
I find all more, I guess, sort of the edges, but it's not the edges because there's no real middle. I find society, I find people fascinating, and I love the things I know nothing about I find the most fascinating. So when I find myself in a situation where I really don't know, you know, it's not my life experience like a lot of people I've worked with. So Lee McQueen, for instance, you know, we are very different people, but that's part of the pleasure was getting to know him and to be inside his mind. And that's the privilege of being a fashion photographer and working with people like Lee as you get to be somebody else's mind, somebody else's vision of life. And that's the thrill of it. So I always like it when I don't know anything about that part of life or that way of life. And I am fascinated by people. I find them perpetually inspiring. I guess the more so I don't want to say extreme, because people aren't really extreme and normal. I think everybody's odd, everybody's strange, everybody's got their own version of life, if you care. But to ask. It's like the thing about everybody's beautiful, you just have to see it.
- [09:09]
Bella Freud
Yeah, yeah. I really agree. And you seem to have this ability to recognize that I think more than. More than any other people. You're certainly the first person in many. With many of those artists who are, you know, incredibly original and disruptors. You seem to know how to work with them. And I wondered with clothes, when did you first become obsessed with clothes as a child? Was there anything in particular that you honed in on as a garment?
- [09:46]
Nick Knight
I remember at kindergarten, it goes right back. I remember at kindergarten coming back to my mother and saying, I saw these two little girls at school today and they looked so pretty in their little dresses. And I can still remember them. I must have been like three or four. I still remember feeling, oh, that's really exciting, something really great there. But I think the first garment I can remember wasn't that much further away. I lived in Britain to begin with my life. And then I moved. My father was with NATO. He was a psychologist as part of the diplomatic corps. I've got no idea how the two relate, but that apparently is what he was. So we moved from England to France in 1966. Huge cultural upheaval for me. Really changed my life completely. And then we moved. And then General de Gaulle in 1967, decided to kick NATO out of France, the only part of NATO anymore. And we moved to Belgium, to Brussels. And I remember going to CNA in the sort of local shopping mall, mall, mall, mall, and really, really wanting a black, wet look shirt. And I probably was seven or eight, I remember, really passionate, my mum, to get me this black, wet look shirt. I can't. I've got no idea why I wanted it, why I thought it was good for me to have this shirt. But it was a very shiny, sort of silky, satiny kind of thing. I was desperate to have this Shirt. And I think fashion on the continent, in Europe, mainland Europe, in the sort of late 60s, early 70s, well, late 60s really was very different to what was happening in Britain. Hence again, when we moved back. As we moved back from Brussels to London. Sorry. To England to provincial England, to near between Huntington and Cambridge, so on the Fens. We moved back in 1970. And it was a real fashion culture shock because I was wearing stuff that. I've got no idea how to describe it, but it wasn't what they were wearing in England. And the first thing that happened to me. We have a house in Petersham and my father had the same house. We since changed it, but we had. On the way back from Brussels to Cambridgeshire, we stopped off at Petersham and in London to look at the house to make sure it was okay because I've been renting it out. And I went for a walk with my friend down the road. And first thing I came across, this is age 10, was a group of skinheads. It's about 20 of them. And I really didn't fit in visually. I really didn't look like anybody else at that time. And I was, you know, what didn't go well. And then I went to a comprehensive school with a first year of comprehensive in Huntingdon.
- [12:36]
Bella Freud
Wow.
- [12:37]
Nick Knight
At a place called Hinchinbrook. And it was a school uniform. And there's nothing worse for a child who is just finding their own sexuality. I'm just discovering what it is to be sexual, to be told you have to wear a school uniform. And it wasn't just so some school uniforms, you can go, oh, well, there's something there. That. There's some. This there really wasn't. It was a green. The blazer was a green of which there is no natural equivalent. I've never seen that green since, if you want to imagine Astroturf. But worse, it was that sort of color, repulsive green color that suited nobody. I might certainly not. My skin color, you know, sort of pale, wasn't good with sort of bright neon green blazer. So they sort of desexualized you.
- [13:29]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [13:29]
Nick Knight
And I found that the biggest shock. And then at the time, I remember my favorite film in Brussels I saw just before I came back was Woodstock. And so I really wanted to be in Woodstock. I was like, my. This is age 10. I thought, you know, that's what I want to be. I want to be, you know, long and undiscovered sort of, you know, bands like Lead Zeppelin stuff and long curly hair. And then Jimi Hendrix for huge Afro. I Think that's what I want. And no idea. I couldn't actually grow an afro. But so that's what my first thing I wanted to be. And then discovered Mark Bolan and T. Rex. I thought no, this is what I want to be. And so I sort of slid from kind of Woodstock into Glamrock all the time. Being in Britain in the early 1970s, which was the dullest place you could imagine fashion wise apart from they had skinheads and it was everything I stood against. When I first experienced it, it was short cropped hair and it was like really sort of these tough utilitarian clothes and very kind of sharp. And I wasn't at all there in my own head. I was off with Mark Boland. But also the funny thing was better people I don't think realize this now. It's is you couldn't buy clothes. It wasn't like you could go into a shop and buy a kind of great. There were no clothes. Yeah. 1112 year old boy, you couldn't go and buy your clothes anyway. Especially provincial Britain. Yeah, the same. The only fashion shop in Huntington sold was the same place you bought your school uniform from. So that sort of sets you some sort.
- [15:09]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [15:10]
Nick Knight
So the only place you could get clothes were at the Army Navy store. So you'd have to get close and you'd have to customize them, dye them or cut them up or you know, whatever it is. But that was all part of, you know what it was. But the, the funny thing I remember is because we were so close poor. I don't mean we were poor financially. I mean there's no way you could buy them. How much money had. We're so close poor. My group of friends, we had one pair of Dr. Martins, silver painted Dr. Martins that we'd pass around the group. So you'd get a week with these boots. And they were silver and they were eight holes, they weren't very high. And I had Hawkwind written down the side that somebody had written probably quite badly. And that was. They were prized positions. So you had your week with a. With the Hawk and Doc Martens, that was a thing. But then somebody got hold of a pair of platform boots and they were like literally like kind of. The sweet would wear one of those glam rock bands and they were really priced. But they would, you know, the same thing. You'd have to pass them around a group. Luckily we all seem to manage to fit in them. But. Yeah, so you, you wouldn't have much access to closed day case. And my look That I imagined for myself was kind of a weird. I discovered makeup at a time and it was completely whatever, but it was. You see there in the film Death in Venice is a character called Tadjo. Beautiful curly haired boy. And I really wanted to be Taggio, but I had straight hair, didn't have curly hair at all. But I had this look that I kind of invented. And I went all the way down. I had a friend, lives in Plymouth, Portsmouth. Portsmouth, Plymouth, Plymouth, Plymouth, Flushing. He lived in. And I went across. I went down to see him and I had my hair permed. Local, like a loose curly hair. Anyway, like I said, no good for me Afro. Wasn't everybody. I had my hair permed and I had this outfit that I kind of created which was from an RV Navy store. So I've got something from the sort of, you know, what sailors would wear, basically. So kind of sort of square, you know, little things with white. And I wore this white sailor suit with blue makeup and this loose, shaggy perm. God, you must have just gone. Fights all the time. Ridiculous sort of way of how not to fit in. Anyway, suddenly that all came crashing down and I decided that's not what I wanted to look like at all. And that's when I sort of started dressing in a more skinhead, like fashion, should we say. And I think there's something that happens to you when you're going from childhood to adulthood. That adolescence bit stays you forever. Yeah, that's what French call your donne stable. Your sort of. Your stable values. And they're rooted, I think, in adolescence. That short period where. Where we don't know whether you're an adult or a child. And we're desperately trying to find out.
- [18:08]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [18:09]
Nick Knight
And I think I still have the same values I had then. So I'd be 15, 14, 15. And there was one kid who's my El. I have an elder brother, Chris. Love. I love Chris, but he had a lot of strange friends and one of them was this really sharp skinhead called Spyro Sparrow, Agnes, Stephen, Steve Agnew. And he was. There was a big council estate, you know, Huntington or basically without going too much into the sort of social whatever of the time they. When London was bombed out in the war, they moved a lot of people out of London up what was called Expansion corridor.
- [18:46]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [18:46]
Nick Knight
And one of them was up the A1 and there was places like Stevenage 100 was another one when they built a. A big council estate called the Oxmoor Estate on the edge of this little market town called Huntingdon. Consequently, you had these real cockneys living up and you know, people from East End of London living up out in the fens basically. And there was a kind of. But the kids on the Oxmoor estate were great and Steve Agnew, Spyro Agnew was one of the sharpest and I remember him turning up at my house one Sunday night and he was on a little scooter, strip back scooter and he had a two tone tonic blazer on with a pocket handkerchief with a stud in it and the button down shirt and the kind of stay pressed and the loafers, all that stuff. And he was so sharp and he was so, you know, he was, you know, good with his fists and he was all sort of, you know, for a 13, 14 year old boy you kind of looked up to. Yeah, so he was dead odd and he was. And he was so confident and so cocky and show. So sure of himself and it was that mixed with all those other references I just felt. I didn't, I didn't, you know, all the sort of glam rock stuff, all of that stuff, all the. It just went straight out the window and I got into a very, that sort of very sharp, utilitarian, no nonsense sort of way of dressing, which here we are, God, 65 years later.
- [20:16]
Bella Freud
What is your first book is Skinhead and that. Everybody has that book. I've got it somewhere in my chaos of library. But it's so fascinating listening to how your cloth obsession as a small child was completely overrode any type of self consciousness and how that's taken you into such a high art kind of realm of fashion. And I wondered what the first piece of art was that you saw that made you think you wanted to become part of that.
- [20:57]
Nick Knight
I think the first piece of art I remember, I can't be sure that it did. To find anything to do with fashion was. Is it Carl Andre the bricks?
- [21:08]
Bella Freud
Oh my God. I was obsessed with him really.
- [21:11]
Nick Knight
Well, he was. He had a show or there was a. There was the two lines of bricks, pale bricks at the tape. I remember being very kind of angry with that, very challenged by it and then trying to understand it and then thinking I should go and disrupt it and then thinking no, it's brilliant. And I think that's when art starts to make some sense. You're not just like that's pretty. And yeah, because all the sort of Pre Raphaelite stuff and the Alphonse Moucher and all that sort of psychedelic stuff that was so absorbed into kind of, you know, sort of early Sort of rock music in 1970s. So there was that. But the real art, the first time it really mattered to me was Carl Andre's bricks. That's when it mattered. But I can't see, I can't even when my most imaginative state imagine how that had any effect on my fashion. You could say it's a rigor, a sort of, you know, a sort of decided. Is this not that?
- [22:12]
Bella Freud
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, because I, I, I heard about him. My dad didn't talk about art very much, but for some reason he told me this story and I don't even know if it's true. And he said, oh, yes, there's this artist, Carl Andre, and he did this thing where you went into this broken down house and walked up eight flights of stairs and right at the top in this attic, there was Carl Andre sitting in the bath with lumps of rotting meat floating around.
- [22:43]
Nick Knight
Excellent.
- [22:44]
Bella Freud
And I thought, oh my God, that's the most amazing. I wanted to see it. And I've tried looking it up and I've never found any such thing. But it seems to go with the idea of him and it, it was just such a good, good image.
- [23:01]
Nick Knight
There's also like Vito Acconci.
- [23:04]
Bella Freud
I don't know about Vito.
- [23:05]
Nick Knight
Country Great. I mean, in that vein, he had a piece where he created, I think it was a glass floor in a gallery. And I think. Yeah, I'll summarize. It was a glass floor and Vita, you'd walk into the gallery and under the floor would be Vito Croni masturbating.
- [23:23]
Bella Freud
Oh my God. Which.
- [23:26]
Nick Knight
It's a little bit in the same domain.
- [23:28]
Bella Freud
Yeah. Because Marina Abramovic was, was, did a performance where she described that. Anyway, I think the ordinance couldn't see, see it. It just, I think all those things seem quite connected to fashion because something happens that doesn't really make any sense, but the, the outcome is very affecting and I don't know, I love, I love those type of absurdist things.
- [24:00]
Nick Knight
Yeah. I always thought of fashion's probably and arguably one of the most important art forms we have. And part of it comes from my time as a skinhead because I knew what my physical appearance, what that effect they would have on other people for good and for bad. And I think it's how we, it's what we first see of people and it's how we express ourselves. There are very few, if any, people who dress randomly. I mean, you might think. But most people make some sort of elective decision to at least present themselves in some way to Say something. So it's self expression. So I think fashion be much maligned but fashion for me is one of the most important art forms we have. And I've always enjoyed playing with it. I've always enjoyed knowing the effect it has and also enjoyed just the richness of it. Yeah, in part I think it comes from a sort of dichotomy in my parents. My father was a very unfashioned person so he, as I said, he worked for NATO and he worked for the Ministry of Defense, he worked with the Royal Air Force and then his last office was at Admiralty Arch. So it was very much a part of that sort of world. Imagine Tinker Taylor, soldier, spy, sort of my dad's world and everything. All the walls in the Admiralty Arch were painted sort of fawn or mushroom or taupe or those sort of subtle colors that shouldn't disturb or stand out. And that's the sense of dress as well. So my dad was very much. That mother was the complete opposite. My mother would change her clothes three or four or five times a day. So she'd dress for breakfast, she dressed for 11 o' clock in the morning, she dressed for luncheon, she dressed for mid afternoon, dress for high tea, she dressed for supper, she dressed all the way through the day, she would be changing and my parents lived alone so she was just doing it for the fun of it. And she and my mother wanted me to be a doctor. I think my father just wanted me to be able to afford food but my mother wanted me to be a doctor and I kind of went along with that. I thought yeah, I like the idea of being a doctor, kind of like that sort of caring and useful society thing. And so I know it was a fashion photographer better. I like the idea of being a doctor morally and I went along with it without questioning it. My father was a scientist with psychologist and my mother originally was a physiotherapist. So they're both in sciences and she wasn't allowed to be a doctor because her father said it was unladylike. My mother was born in 1915 so it's a whole bunch of values which are almost completely antiquated now. Yeah, but she wasn't allowed to be a doctor. So I think part the of partly it was transferring her frustration not allowed to be. Not being allowed to be a doctor. Partly she probably wanted a doctor in the family, but so I didn't manage to be a doctor. I did one year trying to get into medical college. I screwed up my A levels quite badly And I scraped in to do a course in human biology at Chelsea College, University of London, with the idea that I would swap at the end of the first year of human biology onto the first year of a medical course. If I did really well. I really didn't do well. I just couldn't, you know, if you don't go to any of the lectures, spend your time mucking around, then you're not going to do very well. So I didn't go to any lectures and I was in on the middle of the King's road in about 1978. So it was quite interesting.
- [27:41]
Bella Freud
Must have been amazing.
- [27:43]
Nick Knight
So end up going to Boltham Pool Crunch of art, studying photography but with a view and a view a desire to be a fashion photographer. And my mother was really pleased by that because she never really expressed it, but she was so into fashion and in fact when she died, Alexander McQueen was making her this beautiful dress and of course I worked under contract for Lancome and Dior and a whole bunch of other ones and so her bathroom was just full of product. She worked for long co they give you all the products you need perfumes, they give you the perfumes, etc. Etc. And I would cause just give them straight on to my mum. So she got. I think probably something felt better to her, which is to have a fashion photographer as a son rather than a doctor. But I wanted to be a psychiatrist. That was where I was really when I was entertaining the idea of being a doctor. It was to do psychiatry.
- [28:38]
Bella Freud
So with the lens now because you really. You do get under the skin.
- [28:45]
Nick Knight
Yeah, I think so. I'm not sure whose skin you get under, whether it's your own or the sitters. But.
- [28:50]
Bella Freud
Well, someone's. Any of. It's good, isn't it? Yes, there's the life and because in the 80s you worked with Mark Askely and these great art directors and what was so good about that group of image makers from the 80s and what was their instrument of change? Because they quite legendary figures now.
- [29:14]
Nick Knight
Do you mean people like Peter Savile and Mark Ascoli? Yeah, different things. I mean they're who they are. So they are. They are very special people, both of them. Mark Ascoli is a wonderful man. He was my fashion school so I knew a little bit about fashion the beginning of the 80s I was working mainly with Simon Foxen, another wonderful man.
- [29:38]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [29:39]
Nick Knight
Doing things for ID magazine and then I crossed over to Paris and started working for Yoji Yamamoto under the tutelage of Mark Ascoli. Marcus Scolio is one of those art directors of which I've never come across another. He was a sort of. Or is a, you know, a breeder pocket apart. Very in. We would. We would talk for a month, month and a half. So go see the. The Yogi show in Paris and then spend the next month and a half talking about it and studying it and then trying to push my photography further. So anything I would do, because I worked them for. For three years, so that's. And I worked for the men's and the women's seasons. There's about 12 campaigns. It's quite a lot of photographic material.
- [30:29]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [30:30]
Nick Knight
And every time I try and reinvent myself. So the first one was very black and white, and the second one, therefore had to be very colorful. You know, the first was very still. The second one would be. Have to be. So you try and go against every time I would have to reapply to Marcus Goli to get the campaign back and sort of win him over again. So I was just really, really, really pushing the whole sort of photography thing to try and get further on in it. And he was a hard taskmaster. I remember on shoots, you know, you'd start photographing and he'd come and look even down into your Hasselblad. If you find you work on Hasselblad or in the back of the 10 8, when you start to work on 10 8, he'd just come and look and walk away. Wouldn't say anything. And he wouldn't really be happy for hours. You'd just spend hours and hours turning the model this way, that way, inside out. Making. Just trying to get a picture that would make this man happy, to make him go, oh, and I remember one time, one comment, and I shouldn't tell too many anecdotes. It's a slightly private. I remember one time he came and looked at my viewfinder and looked at him. Palo Versi would then walk away.
- [31:48]
Bella Freud
That was crushed.
- [31:50]
Nick Knight
Crushed. But he was my school. He was my school, and I. And then, of course, we'd spend a month or so researching. Then we'd shoot it and take about a week to shoot the catalog. And then we'd spend a month, or not a month and a half working on the layout with Peter. Peter Saville, again, wonderful man. So culturally rich, so refined in his senses. You know, really, these are special people in every sense, just a physical sense. You know, Peter's skin. It's gonna sound weird, but Peter's skin is quite unlike anybody else's skin. I'VE ever seen. And he knew what scent, you know, the smell of a man. So important. Peter would know exactly how to smell. And yeah, it's such a. I know it probably sounds odd, but these things are important in your interaction with people. It's the texture of their skin, the, you know, how their hair is. All those things are so, really so fundamentally important. And Mark, who is half Tunisian and half Italian, was so kind of, you know, Is it charnel, the French word for kind of, you know, about. About the body? You know, it's so much about the physicality, about the smell, about the texture, about how they move, about the sound of their voices. All these things. So important when you're working with somebody. But both Peter and Mark pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed to make those campaigns the best they could possibly be. And every season I would have to persuade Mark that I was the right photographer again to do. To do the campaign. And so I was always going up against other photographers, always sort of. I remember there was one season when Nigel Shafferan was trying to do the campaign and I had to outdo Nigel Chaperon. He would have done a great campaign. He had this whole idea, which was brilliant, that he was going to get the collection and him and Mark were going to go to Barbes, the kind of Arab quarter of Paris at the time, and give the clothes away on the street and photograph the reaction to. Of the people receiving the clothes, which would be brilliant. I wish he'd done the campaign. But anyway, I did it, so that's great. That's what it is. But I'm not quite sure where we got to this point. But you were asking about Mark Askalie and Peter Saville. They were my school, certainly Mark was my school in terms of fashion, you know, and after the campaigns came out and I'd be like, kind of all chuffed, he sent me down and he'd say, nick, and he'd show me a book, but by Richard Abedon. I go, oh, great. It's like so much better than anything I've been able to do. But it was so. It was never easy. It was never sort of full of price. And I found when I stopped working with Mark and Peter, I found that really hard when I started working for other publications and for other companies. You know, you do the first Polaroid and shoot. I would go, it's amazing. You think, no, it's not.
- [34:41]
Bella Freud
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:42]
Nick Knight
I've got to be here suffering for about four or five hours before anybody can say it's Even remotely good. You can't say it's amazing already. And so I. I was very much part of a way of working where you would tear yourself apart to get a great image. Yeah, we would push and push and push and push and push until you could hardly stand anymore. And, you know, you'd have to get to that point where you physically couldn't go on before the day could finish. And on the Yogi shoots, we would never finishing until 3 or 4 in the morning. We were starting again the next morning at 9.
- [35:13]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [35:14]
Nick Knight
So it was physically, it was hard. I found that when I stopped working with them, I found that really hard. To replace that pushing of your mentor or your tutor.
- [35:25]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [35:25]
Nick Knight
To get better and better. And I guess in music you have people like Rick Rubin, I guess he's a similar sort of character. You know, people would say, you know, he probably doesn't have the kind of that pushing thing, but, you know, you get a very, very different point of view.
- [35:38]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [35:39]
Nick Knight
I worked with Yay with Kanye for 10 years and, you know, his point of view on how we create an image completely different from anybody else's. It goes back to what I was saying to you at the beginning. I get drawn to people who are nothing like me. And I get drawn to ways of being that are outside of what I would naturally do.
- [35:58]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [35:59]
Nick Knight
So Mark and Peter for Yojin, Yoji's clothes were amazing. I mean, it was in the mid. I started working for Yogi in the mid-80s, 86. And at the time you had people like Mugler, Montana, Versace, and it was all about the body. It was all about the woman's body. It was about a cleavage or a waist or a neck or a bum or, you know, it was all about sort of woman's physicality. Yeah, that's what the clothes were showing off. You look at those great sun such he clothes, you know, they're all about sexy, powerful women. And Yoji's clothes are about poetry and about a woman's soul and her intellect. And I so much fell in love with that vision of a woman that wasn't about her sexiness or her body. And I thought, why does it always have to be about that? And then I came across, through Mark, I came across Yojoboto's clothes. And they were about a world I knew nothing about. He was from Japan. It was a whole different culture. How he approached women was, I thought at the time, absolutely beautiful. And talking, you know, in these deep shades of dark blue and black about a woman's soul. And the poetry and intellect. And it was. It was just a million miles away from anything I knew. And I remember going to see my first Yodi show in Paris. Paris. And he was in a Cor. So it was that pyramid in that square. Sorry. And as closer you got as you walked from your hotel, which my time, that time was Louisiane on the south bank, which is about 28 quid a night, you walk closer and closer to the. To the Cor du Louvre and the more people you saw dressed in black and at the time nobody dressed in black, and it was like these little ants were kind of swarming towards this sort of. You know, it's a very strange feeling that you were part of a cult or a sect or something. Just so strange. I say nobody dressed in black, but you didn't in 85, 86, people weren't dressing in black. And I remember there was a couple of people. Dylan Jones wore a lot of Yoji in England, Paul Rutherford and a makeup artist called William Faulkner. And there was a few people I knew that dressed in black in Yoji. And it was so different, slightly military look. So it was a sort of slightly feeling of kind of utilitarian combatness, or not combatness, but utilitarian, but it's this sort of sea of black. And I got, you know, absolutely swallowed up in. In a total love of Yoji, of Mark, that fashion was so different, etc. Etc. Etc.
- [38:33]
Bella Freud
This is a paid advertisement from BetterHelp. Feeling overwhelmed can make it hard to remember what actually makes me feel better. There are so many helpful tips out there and sometimes that's confusing too. What to choose? Should I make the bed or go for a walk? But then I have lots of work and feel stuck about what actions to take. When I asked my therapist what to do when I feel overwhelmed, he said you could think about as having a lot to do rather than being overwhelmed. He knows what I am capable of and I found this very helpful. With over 5,000 therapists in the UK, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health provider professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com neurosis. That's betterhelp.com neurosis it's so interesting just, you know, listening to you describe the exactingness and how it, you know, how it taught you how to work. And it's very unfashionable now to be very demanding of your, you know, the people, the young people. Yeah, one works with and. But I. When I worked for Vivian, she was, you know, she was hard person to get a compliment.
- [40:12]
Nick Knight
I'm sure she was.
- [40:13]
Bella Freud
And you just gave up. You didn't even try. You just tried to do everything you possibly could. And it was a great training. And my parents weren't big on compliments either, so it was really useful to me. And I just don't think I would have known how to do things if I hadn't had this kind of extra. You know, every time I got close to the lifeboat, it moved away, and I just had to try harder. And. And I found things within myself. And I love listening to those stories. And it makes. I think it makes you feel more capable. And now I'm much older, I have to rein back my exactingness. But I also know that it's the most important thing I have is just, I suppose, how you communicate it. And you launched Show Studio as a platform to showcase the entire creative process around fashion and image making. And you're one of the big pioneers of fashion in fashion film. And I wondered if you had a favorite filmmaker.
- [41:30]
Nick Knight
Probably Goddard, probably Jean Goddard. I love his. I love how his films look. They remind me of the Paris I knew. In 66, Paris became such an important cultural reference to me, which, again, it shows Donny Stable, those. Those values that you hook onto quite young and they never leave you. Goddard, I think, is probably my favorite filmmaker. That being said, I don't. I have a strange way watching films that I will watch little tiny bits of films. I know that's very current in culture now that you see, like little moments on Tick Tock or Instagram, but I find that, you know, dipping in and out of films. Filmmakers will hate me for this, but I find that really enjoyable. I don't.
- [42:20]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [42:21]
Nick Knight
To sit down for two and a half hours and watch a whole film, obviously I've done that, but now I get my pleasure from just zipping and sort of looking at 30 seconds of a actress or actor or a scene or, you know, in the way you look at photographs.
- [42:40]
Bella Freud
Yeah, that's so interesting.
- [42:41]
Nick Knight
Go through a book and you bring.
- [42:44]
Bella Freud
That quite a lot into your own filmmaking. These moments which are, you know, sometimes repeated, but sort of like a distillation of something.
- [42:54]
Nick Knight
Fashion, film, film has had to be invented. It isn't a medium that was. I mean, of course, it existed before Show Studio, but there Was never a platform for it. So, you know, people like Blumenfeld and, you know, even Man Ray and. And Gibbor Dan. Yeah, Gibbordan did fashion films but there was nowhere for him to put him. So he filmed his models. Yeah, we have a mod show studio, but there was nowhere for the beer can put on television. Television wasn't going to run a 30 second or minute long Gibbor down. Fashion film as cinema was completely hopelessly out of cycle with access. A cinematographic cycle is about three years roughly to do a film and everything else. And of course fashion is every six months, arguably. So it was completely hopelessly, you know, you couldn't show fashion that's, you know, five seasons out of date. What would be the point? So fashion film didn't really have anywhere to go. So lots of photographers tried it. Some like Serge Lutens did perfume commercials for Japanese brands, I think did some for Shiseido and Yeah, another brand which are brilliant.
- [44:02]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [44:03]
Nick Knight
Avedon did things with Brook Shield, I think it was for some perfume for Calvin Klein.
- [44:11]
Bella Freud
Oh, did he do those?
- [44:12]
Nick Knight
Yeah, he does. But Brook Shields is brilliant.
- [44:15]
Bella Freud
Brilliant.
- [44:15]
Nick Knight
Of course, it's also avid of giving her the platform. So there was a few examples that got through to the mainstream, but largely it was uninvented. And so when I started it in the year 2000, so 25 years ago, and created Show Studio really as a platform for fashion film amongst a range of other things. But that was my main driving force to do it. There was no. We were really inventing it from the beginning and nobody knew how long it should be. How long is a fashion film? And I've made fashion films everywhere from 10 seconds to. To 45 minutes. So how long is a fashion film? It's very different from a film with fashion in it.
- [44:53]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [44:53]
Nick Knight
So the Thomas Crown Affair is a great film with fashion. I mean, not just for what Steve McQueen's wearing losses at Faye Dunaway. Yeah, it's her wardrobe. And Thomas Crown Affair is exquisite. I forget there's a. There's a costume designer or wardrobe. I can't. I don't want to. Film equivalent is. But the person designed Faye Dunn. Faye Dunaway's outfit. The Thomas Crown Affair. It's incredible. And those were films which influenced fashion. But that's not a fashion film. Yeah, a fashion film is the same thing as a fashion photograph, apart from its moving. And so really I've come to conclusion after 25 years of twisting this idea around in my head that a fashion film is just about a moment it's just about that moment that you try and capture as a fashion photographer, but with a few frames either side, it's just fashion in movement. Because when you create a garment and you'll notice better, I'm sure when you create it, you imagine it being in life so being moving. I don't think any designer would create a garment just as a still two dimensional thing. You always imagine how it moves, how the light changes across it, how somebody's body moves within it, etc, etc. So fashion photography has been a compromise in a way of designers sort of ideas. So fashion film, if it can show a garment in movement, that's all it really has to do. I think when we started fashion film in 2000 for Show Studio, a lot of other people who also started it from that then said, oh, it's a film. So it has to have a narrative, has to tell a story. Which I think is completely wrong because most great fashion photographs don't tell a story, they might hint at something. So if you look at an Avalon picture of Verushka jumping across, you know, a silent, seamless gray background, it's full of energy and life and style and allure and desire and all those sorts of things. But 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, courage or whoever it would be, would have imbued a piece of clothing with a narrative. And so you want the models 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 Vrushka or Twiggy jumping across one of those great Avalon photographs, which are sort of the quintessential fashion photograph of the 20th century, jumping across that gray background full of dynamic, et cetera, et cetera, 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 or, you know, all the importance of sound in cinema is so huge. And if you go to cinema you expect to cry. Crying is something that we kind of expect our films to be able to make us do. Yeah, we don't expect it in photography. It's very strange. Sort of, I would argue, slightly emotionally stunted medium. Photographers are going to hate me. That's filmmakers of progress hating me, doing well. So in some ways are slightly emotionally stunted because 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. And I think that's to do with a combination of film and sound, so imagery and sound.
- [49:13]
Bella Freud
Yeah. God, that's such a good point about this film.
- [49:16]
Nick Knight
So all of that had to be invented to try and make fashion films work. And of course, the delivery platform for a fashion film is really important. You know, delivery platform for fashion photograph had been the magazine and that had been a very, very, very good way to deliver a very, very good vision of fashion and have been supported by the magazines. Fashion photographers were supported and encouraged and financed and given the time and the money and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to make great fashion photographs. Avedon was given two weeks in Japan with Diana Vreeland to do 10 pictures. That's time and support they needed. 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 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 starts around mid, you know, when my mum was born, 1915, with Baron Adolf de Meyer and Steichen, Edward Steichen, great photographers working for Conde Nast. And there start to create this idea of what a fashion photograph is. Both highly romantic pictorialists, you know, very, very romantic, akin to painting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that's a different story. Wind on 25 years from that, you really haven't got to a modern definition. Well, who. Where are we? 1915, 1925, 1935. You know, you're dealing with people like Muntkaski and, you know, Hoinegan or, you know, George Platt, lines 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.
- [51:23]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [51:23]
Nick Knight
And they're posed and they're, you know, hoity, etc. Etc. And they're beautiful. But, you know, it's not until you get Avedon Penn and then, you know, Bailey and Newton and Bordeaux and all, you get a sort of contemporary dialogue of what a fashion photograph should be. So we've spent 25 years trying to understand what hell fashion film should be. So I'm not too buffered. Yeah, 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. So I'll try to be quick. 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 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. Argument was about the right length. And then now Instagram, you can put 90 seconds on them and then you've got TikTok and then you got YouTube. YouTube hours on. And so fashion films started getting different lengths again. You know, I did the ones I did for John Galliano when he was at Margiela during COVID were 45 minutes long. So generals I did for Gareth Pugh were about the same length. So they started spieling 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.
- [52:51]
Bella Freud
Yeah, it's so dreadful.
- [52:53]
Nick Knight
And it often to do with music. 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. I'm now the conclusion. It's about, you know, 10 seconds.
- [53:08]
Bella Freud
They're very difficult to make fashion films for sort of a multitude of reasons. But. But when they. When they're good, they're absolutely amazing. I mean, I was watching Sleep, your first live stream event of.
- [53:25]
Nick Knight
Of.
- [53:26]
Bella Freud
Of models asleep, and I. I wondered how you decided who would be most interesting asleep. And like, there's all these different amazing girls and one in One of the clips, her wig comes off and just sort of. It's. I love. I thought. I really enjoyed that. How did that. That happen?
- [53:48]
Nick Knight
Well, one of the things the Internet provided was. Provided quite a few things which quite radically different from Magazine World. One of them was live broadcasting. And we started show 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 time 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 we. For sleep, we. And so you could stream one single frame out every minute. And so for sleep we asked. I think it was five models. And we did a course of two nights, so ten models in all. And the Metropolitan gave us a floor of the hotel room. And we styled these models up. So, like super styled up. And, you know, McQueen and, you know, all the kind of great fashion at the time. Fox and Simon Foxton did it and I think Sidoni from McQueen did it. And Jonathan Case, a great stylist. We style these girls out. We did their hair and their makeup and then we just put them on a bed, just like I'm lying in bed and said to them, okay, now go to sleep. And we obviously was. Obviously it was kind of nighttime, so it was appropriate for them to go sleep. And then they just fell asleep. But of course, in your sleep you move around and of course if you're wearing a kind of dress, it sort of bunches up and they weren't comfortable and then they kind of do that and knock, as you said, knock the wig off.
- [55:18]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [55:19]
Nick Knight
You know, I think Liberty Ross has had a short whip that she was sleeping with. Short crop. And then one girl had to go get up at 5 o' clock in the morning. So she wrote, I think, in lipstick on the bed sheets and, you know, goodbye. 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 it was very. When I first thought of doing it, I thought it would be quite mutiny, quite helmet Newtony and quite virustic, quite esque. And I was a bit concerned about that because I was. I. I've always been slightly dubious about sexuality 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 a sort of lothario photographer was comedic to say the least.
- [56:13]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [56:14]
Nick Knight
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 is 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, as it were, I thought that it would be a bit Hellman Uni, a bit kind of creepy and virustic and actually they were like pre Raphaelite paintings.
- [56:41]
Bella Freud
Yeah. It was very beautiful.
- [56:43]
Nick Knight
And because they were on a real piece of lo fi equivalent equipment, because it was on the crappy webcams that. Which were sort of so lo fi at the time because you just couldn't stream much data out and they were beautiful. And an assistant of mine, fantastic girl called Ruth Hogman, who is one of the inventors of fashion film would be. She asked for a leaving present of a print from sleep. And we did her a sort of 3 meter big print of one of the people, one of the girls from sleep. And it was beautiful. It was like a Klimt. It was so painterly. There's such gloriousness in lo fi. Because lo fi shows you the mistakes.
- [57:23]
Bella Freud
Yeah, yeah.
- [57:23]
Nick Knight
And because show studio has never had any money to speak of. We've always had to do things for nothing. And so, you know, whether it was a sort of security camera that we had to use as our camera or whether what it was always make doing men, it was always Blue Peter. It was always kind of. But that forces you to be creative.
- [57:40]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [57:41]
Nick Knight
So the sleep thing was these kind of really cheap webcams that would a. The ones we could get be all we could stream out at the time. But the quality of the lo fi is because it. There's something about being able to see through the cracks in life.
- [57:57]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [57:58]
Nick Knight
To be able to see to something better. And 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. 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. And 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 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. 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. 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, 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 fight photograph. But to get anywhere near a brilliant photograph, you have to go through hell.
- [59:50]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [59:50]
Nick Knight
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.
- [60:05]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [60:06]
Nick Knight
You're trying to see your desire. You're trying to see with intuition, perception and all those sorts of. 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. It's a deep searching to try and find an image which is good 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. You 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 Mark Ascoli going, Ballon Garcia, or whatever it is.
- [61:03]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [61:03]
Nick Knight
But you have people around you and that team, that collaboration, whether it's Lee, McQueen or John Galliano or Gaga, 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. The early Tanist ever happened to me was with a picture of bjork with Alexander McQueen.
- [61:35]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [61:35]
Nick Knight
Where she was for the COVID of Homogenic. And Lee came to the session and Bjork walked in and.
- [61:44]
Bella Freud
Was that the one with her lips, those tiny lips?
- [61:47]
Nick Knight
Yeah.
- [61:48]
Bella Freud
And the amazing spiral.
- [61:51]
Nick Knight
It's the Homogenic cover, which is. Was literally the first shot. So she stood in front of the camera, Lee's next to me, and I was working on a 10 by 8 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. So don't move in between. And then you show people a sheet of Polaroid. Lee saw the Polar and go, right, I got it. We're going by left. Literally one shot and he walked out there. We got it, didn't see it. He said to Bjork, bye to me. Off he went. And Bjork and I were kind of like, well, we're all here and dressed up, so we might as well try. So we went on and on and on trying. We were. I worked for three and a half hours with her to try and get a shot was better and didn't achieve it. And that was partly the brilliance of Alexander McQueen.
- [62:40]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [62:41]
Nick Knight
That he could see things we couldn't see, that he was already so in advance of. 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've 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 in spontaneous, you know, work in a medium which is about spontaneous. It's about your initial reaction to a scene.
- [63:17]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [63:17]
Nick Knight
Sometimes, especially if you're working in 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, the glimmer of light. Try. So there were 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. I'm just as nervous today, before I take a photograph, as I was when I first started, probably more so.
- [64:04]
Bella Freud
I think those nerves are signs of life, aren't they? Because I, 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 be. Have just drifted into complacency and that description of, you know, going through the failure and, 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. And 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 something that we don't know what it is. And so I love that. And talking of Alexander McQueen and you work really closely with him all through his career, the thing I particularly remember is the, the story you did for Dazed and Confused with Amy Mullins, the Paralympic athlete on the COVID and showing her custom made artificial legs. And you said that Lee would come to you with amazing ideas that were often quite dark and you seemed 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.
- [65:55]
Nick Knight
No, I like the idea or 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. 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 and how important all of that energy is. And in the teams on the photographic shoot, I mean, it boils down to hairdresser, makeup artist, stylist, and art director. So there's about four or five people. Is that chemistry is so important? It's really important what hairdresser you have. And people are very dismissive of that. So I think it's one of the things hard. I will answer your question, I promise. One of the hard things to. 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 use the same teams. Ham 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. 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 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 kind of like extras. So they don't get a hierarchy. I've never understood.
- [67:38]
Bella Freud
The shot, would they on a film, the hairdresser would never jump into the shot and fix that.
- [67:45]
Nick Knight
It's so important when you're creating an image. And Sam's. I don't see he's a God. But, you know, those. Those people like Eugene and Sam, they're such masters, you know, and Val and Pat and, you know, Issa Mayer, and they're great. They're as important as McQueen and Gaga. Hey, whatever you. You asked me, I'll try to answer your questions, rather go off with tangents. I never felt conflict with Liam, 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 for him, Worked for the Florence Biennales on a set of images, Venice or the Florence Pinal, I can't remember what it was we created. And one of the images he wanted to do, he said to me, nick, I want to have this. This girl and she's floating in raw sewage. And I wanted to photograph her floating in raw sewage. I was like, lee, you. You can't. You can't put a model in raw sewage. And Charlotte, you can't just photograph a girl lying in raw sewage. And Lee thought for a bit, all right. And he said, all right, some oil. I want a floating in some point. And Charlotte was like, lee, you can't put a human being in some oil because it'll grow their skin. So there were ideas like that which he didn't really see, see part. I mean, I don't know how he would have survived in today's world, but there were ideas like that which were dark, but they were just impractical, more than they were sinister.
- [69:26]
Bella Freud
Because he said in some of the things I was looking at, he said, he brought you his psychotic brain and you bought him pure professionalism. It was such a gorgeous. It was just perfection.
- [69:41]
Nick Knight
It was such a joy to work with in the way a nightmare can be a joy. It wasn't ever a nightmare. That's not at all. I shouldn't reset it because it's not really told 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.
- [70:00]
Bella Freud
He said another 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 couldn't be in a picture. Rather than smacking someone in the face.
- [70:16]
Nick Knight
Yeah.
- [70:17]
Bella Freud
So touching.
- [70:19]
Nick Knight
There's. There's something. There's some. We. 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 flying up into the sky and it's sort of, you know, its passage through them. And his idea that he came to me with that was, oh, I want to photograph as if a bus hits a bus queue of people. I thought, holy, no, no, no, you can't do that. And so, you know, 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. Yeah, that work. We can work with that. So often it was just a recal. Recalibration of how he'd express the idea rather than the actual essence of the idea. In the end, the picture, which is supposed to be in raw sewage, we did the 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, swimming pool. Yeah. It's like, you know, you can inflate in the studio. Filled it foot and a half deep of pure molasses. I can't remember how many gallons we poured into this thing. And then we put the girl in it, sitting on top of it. So pushed the girl into it and 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 because it's actually. It's not. You imagine it to be better. It sounds much better than it. It was. It was just a sheet of shiny black, very dark brown reflective material. And once the girl went into it, because you can't see through it, you just lost her. So some of the ideas just didn't work.
- [72:30]
Bella Freud
So it sounds like such a revelation lying in a pool of molasses. But it's interesting to find that. Isn't that interesting.
- [72:39]
Nick Knight
The process was much more interesting. Getting it in and getting it out. It was quite a process.
- [72:44]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [72:45]
Nick Knight
Otherwise it's just like. There's something in digital photography called the clipping plane, which people who study tech will know what I'm talking about, where we really create a 3D avatar of somebody. And when it goes outside of the data wall, if you want. Anyway, I try to explain in layman's terms. I don't even know professional terms, but you get what's called clipping. They just disappear. It was a bit like you had a clipping plane on a shint, 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 you've been in there for a while, it's quite hard getting around. And I thought, oh, it'll make a brilliant picture, her covered in molasses.
- [73:22]
Bella Freud
No, you didn't get a picture, didn't.
- [73:25]
Nick Knight
Get a good picture.
- [73:26]
Bella Freud
God.
- [73:26]
Nick Knight
Anyway. Anyway. Anyway.
- [73:29]
Bella Freud
Yeah. Because one of the pictures of yours that I became obsessed, obsessed with was the photograph of Devon aoki 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 COVID the Independent. 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. And what are the qualities that in a model where you. That you look for? Because it was such a powerful, such a beautiful photograph.
- [74:25]
Nick Knight
I think you have to see beauty in them. It doesn't mean they have to be beautiful, but you have to see beauty in them. And as I'm sure you, you know, as much as I do, that beauty manifests in so many different ways. 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. I need to be interested in them.
- [75:04]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [75:04]
Nick Knight
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? So I only really want to work with designers that I love and I admire. Yeah. And that's, you know, it'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, you know, it's not a problem. There are amazing. Lots of amazing fashion designers. Of course, life is very. You know what fascinating about life is how the opposites. So, yeah, 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 Muglers or the Versace, but now with a different head on or a different attitude or a different. Just trying to see the opposite. Fascinating, incredible clothes. So 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 that you've. You. They send you into a. A kind of. When you can imagine somebody's life and their. And their thoughts. It's. And you become obsessed.
- [76:25]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [76:27]
Nick Knight
Not in a stalker weird way, but just kind of because it's amazing. I mean, 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.
- [76:46]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [76:47]
Nick Knight
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 me for Instagram is finding people who I think are physically amazing. I mean, you know how they look. And so, you know, I will write to them on Instagram, I'll direct message them, I'll say, hi, you know, I'm Nick Knight and I'm 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 and, you know, they're very nice thing. Yeah. There's a girl at the moment who's in Kazakhstan.
- [77:29]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [77:30]
Nick Knight
But I can't get her out of Kazakhstan, so. But she's incredible looking. Really incredible looking. Just a vision of, you know, what the human. I just find it fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I remember the first time I photographed Gemma Ward. She was amazing when she walked on stage and once she'd opened for Prada, I think, and then she walked. I 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. And I remember thinking she just looked like no doubt I'd ever seen. So inspiring. So, you know, that's what I mean. Become obsessed. 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, you know, I just have this desire to work with them, to photograph, film them, work them, make sculptures of them. Now because now we. I make sculptures. I3D scan people and they, of course, can print out a. A sculpture of them. And so that's become my thing, you know, I'm obsessed with now is 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. There's a girl I photographed quite a lot called Tessa Karagi. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person who's a psychiatrist actually. Anyway, she became pregnant and I photographed her when she was nine months pregnant. I saw a very big tummy and then I made a sculpture of her. I photographed her lying back and did a sculpture, 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, pregnancy with a broken egg. So I got a fresh egg and I broke it into this sort of concave part of her tummy after having taken out the kind of the sphere of the pregnancy. And it's beautiful because then the, 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 joke in it. So working with sculptures. Yeah, I think are fascinating. I'm trying to make one out of 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 wash basin 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 VNA 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.
- [80:40]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [80:40]
Nick Knight
So I'm very into the materiality of the sculptures as much as the form of the sculptures.
- [80:45]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [80:45]
Nick Knight
Because it opens up a whole range of sensory things which I haven't previously been able to engage with. Something wonderful weird about being a photographer, especially digital photography. Want to call it that. It's 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 with photographer, it's click, click, click, that's it. It's very frustrating. 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 doing something at show studio and I actually wasn't. I was Thinking about this thought I've had for a long time about a tactility of our art and how I'd find a. Photography is frustrating because it's not tactile and everyone's covered in white emulsion paints. I would get 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.
- [82:03]
Bella Freud
And with clothes, if you fancy someone and you don't like what they're wearing, does it kill your attraction to them?
- [82:12]
Nick Knight
I think I. 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 there are, you know, because once of a certain age. I'm 66, so I've been in and out of different fashion trends over the years and things that you take as kind of things that everybody thinks of bad taste and you. You kind of all agree about saying it's a bad taste all of a sudden what everybody's wearing and the height of fashion. And so you have to recalibrate, you know, like things like the mullet, for instance, is a hairstyle which, you know, when 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 has a mullet and he looks gorgeous.
- [82:58]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [82:58]
Nick Knight
I think. 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.
- [83:19]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [83:20]
Nick Knight
And so I wouldn't. I don't think I'd approach it in that way. And I just. I find it as the discovery of things that I don't know what really. Which is the thing that I really. So when somebody does something I don't understand, I'm more if you want, attracted or interested to them because I don't understand what they do. And so I want to understand and I want to try and sort of get in their head. So that's more how I would see it.
- [83:49]
Bella Freud
Yeah. And you described John Galliano as being a Mozart or Leonardo and such a beautiful description. And I was watching your film of him, S W A L K when he was creating the tango collection at Margiela. And he has so many ideas happening all at the same time. And I wondered how you describe. How did you decide which thread to follow to keep the viewer on the narrative?
- [84:22]
Nick Knight
Tricky. In those SW LK films, which are two. I think the tango swag. Two.
- [84:29]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [84:32]
Nick Knight
They're both. After saying that fashion film shouldn't have a narrative. I had to then eat my words and create a narrative.
- [84:39]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [84:39]
Nick Knight
And so we hired a writer to actually give us a narrative which to thread in another thing. So for all intensive 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 he decided to 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. His people who he trusts around him, was incredibly brave and opened up completely on camera. So 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 web. 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 I'm at the end of it. I was filming the collection traffic, try 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. We 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. Like a, you know, a real narrative film. Yes, that's what I say. I believe that fashion film should not have a narrative. So I made two narrative films. In a way, you have to work in opposites.
- [86:09]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [86:10]
Nick Knight
You know, I say that I don't think. I don't presume I'm right and the other person is wrong. Always presume there's another way of doing it. And John is so wonderfully educated, such. And yes, he's our culturally. He's our Mozart. He's a Da Vinci. He's our, you know, so was Lee. You know, they are huge cultural icons whose work of which will occupy the same cultural space that those musicians, those composers, their space occupies in our sort of understanding of culture.
- [86:42]
Bella Freud
There were moments in that film that were so disarming and so moving. Just there were 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 because it was just so beyond what, anything I could imagine. And Don'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 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, and 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.
- [88:12]
Nick Knight
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.
- [88:21]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [88:21]
Nick Knight
So those hits that came out from Supremes, Marvin Gay and all those fantastic singers who I love, it was a hit factory. And just as you're saying those. Those songs, you know, heard it through Grapevine or you. The countless brilliant hits that came out of Motown, of course, they had enormous depth to them, an enormous passion to them, but they were a hit factor. You just had to hear them again, again, again. What I'm questing for is fashion films. So you want to watch again, Again, again. And that's where my feeling is at the moment. And that's why I'm thinking the narratives in the clothes. Don't put a narrative on top of that. Just let the narrative, the clothes, do the talking, just like it doesn't fashion photograph.
- [89:05]
Bella Freud
Yeah, yeah.
- [89:07]
Nick Knight
Liberate that. Put it with a great soundtrack. And now the great thing is, because before we were really caught, because to get a great soundtrack is no more easier 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 Gaye or whatever else onto your little film or your pictures. So now all of 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, 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 values or different Set of constraints, if you want.
- [89:56]
Bella Freud
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?
- [90:26]
Nick Knight
I don't think so, Bella. I don't think so. I mean, I focused such a range of people. You know, when we were doing. You talked earlier about the fashionable 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 who've got very, very different body shapes. I remember before that story, and we're photographing people who said whose mothers had taken the drug floodamide. So Alison Lapper was one. His body's a completely different. Pretty different to our two hours to, I guess, what you would see most times. But they're people and body wasn't the thing. And I remember thinking to myself before I went on to the session, how I'm gonna this up? How could I. I know I'm gonna offer my hand, to shake their hand, and they weren't gonna have a. It's gonna be. I know I'm gonna up. And of course you don't, because it's not about the physical. It's about the person. It's about humanity in a person. And that's the thing that you contact with, and that's the thing you photograph, you know, and it's whatever shape the body is, it's fascinating.
- [91:39]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [91:40]
Nick Knight
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 e chelated long neck. And, you know, it's a 1950s kind of, you know, Lisa fonts and Graves 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, equally as beautiful. I remember so clearly when ye said to me, I'm going to introduce you to my girl. And it was Kim O2O2 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, I just thought that's that feels so wrong.
- [92:41]
Bella Freud
To me, you know, or just prejudice against her in the way.
- [92:45]
Nick Knight
Shape in the way that Kate had so much prejudice against her. What does this girl done to outrage you all?
- [92:52]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [92:52]
Nick Knight
You know, does she stand for values that you don't stand for? Is that such a. Even people who are respect enormously, you know, certain journalists and things was so rude to me about Kim. I sort of thinking I, 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 intensive, hard working and considerate and. So where's the problem here? Yeah, I bet. Much less considerate people, much less educated, much less kind, much less, you know, other. Well, it's, it's. I think people bring so much, I don't know, unnecessary hate to, to things. Yeah, I find it really, really strange.
- [93:46]
Bella Freud
And there's a laziness in, in a sort of knee jerk kind of prejudice like, like that. Just a lack of imagination. And that shows up quite a lot in people in attitudes to fashion.
- [94:01]
Nick Knight
You know, women's shape changed culturally. With Kim, I mean, I could argue where the shape came from, et cetera, et cetera, 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 St Martin's or London College of Fashion, and talking to them about what the students are into. And I 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. They 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. I. I 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.
- [95:02]
Bella Freud
Anyway, and you mentioned about your dad being a psychologist in these military organizations and.
- [95:10]
Nick Knight
Yes.
- [95:10]
Bella Freud
Was that top secret or did it. Did you. Did he tell you anything or what was he looking for?
- [95:19]
Nick Knight
I don't know exactly what he did. I slightly romanticized his job because I didn't know much about it. Not because he was remote. He was an incredibly loving father. Both my parents are incredibly loving. They had their own ways of Being as I said, they were from different generation. But we didn't talk to him about. He didn't have. See, I. I thought about this a lot obviously because he's my dad. 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 prevalent psychological theory was that of a psychologist who I hate called Skid. I shouldn't say I hate. I don't know them. The science. Somebody I don't understand called Skinner. Skinner in 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. Let's go. Go 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 list it. 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 bought 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 lose. 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. Things. Life doesn't work out exactly that way. But the. The idea was that I was brought up without discipline so I was allowed to do whatever I wanted because I would learn nature's boundaries would assert themselves. However, what appeared at the time when I was a young teenager to be brilliant. But I've got. You know, 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 doesn't mean school had no discipline. Discipline.
- [98:10]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [98:11]
Nick Knight
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. So I quickly having no disciplinary Walls in my family quickly went outside those to find the. 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 so think, was that part of some psychological experiment to try and bring up your children about discipline? And of course it all went wrong because we did. We came off the rails.
- [98:47]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [98:48]
Nick Knight
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 and it got very disciplinarian for a while at home. At home, yeah. That psychology was not. Not applied in the same way. So, I mean, without going into it too much. My dad burnt all my clothes.
- [99:20]
Bella Freud
Oh.
- [99:21]
Nick Knight
To stop me going out. So he's so cross of me and my behavior. The way to control me was to burn everything I had 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 that kept you at home. So quite extreme in that way.
- [99:45]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [99:45]
Nick Knight
My father, who never had lifted a finger towards me, beat me up. So it was a bit of shock. God, it just happened to once.
- [99:54]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [99:55]
Nick Knight
And I was like so shocked by the holes. It really rooted me and took me off the path I was going now. Which wasn't a great path, you needing to know, or anybody else needing to know any details. It wasn't a great path. It wasn't going anywhere. Great. So it did re. Abruptly. Very abruptly. Abruptly. Sorry. Put me back onto a path.
- [100:14]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [100:15]
Nick Knight
And that's where I think I started. On the path which I'm still on. It's not totally coherent, but it feels like the same vibe, if you want.
- [100:25]
Bella Freud
Yeah. Yeah.
- [100:26]
Nick Knight
I'm quite chart and I. My wife and I are quite different in terms of how we live our lives. I'm. She's much more freeform and I'm much more sort of ordered, if you want.
- [100:36]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [100:38]
Nick Knight
I see it as a pleasure, but I think other people would call it an issue. But I like things in straight lines and I like things when they're ordered because I can think better that way. So if the house is a total mess, I can't really think very easily. But I've had three children. So the house has been a total mess. 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. And no, it's not. No psychosis there or no, doesn't impinge on my, on my well being or my behavior. But I think that's.
- [101:21]
Bella Freud
I heard of 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.
- [101:30]
Nick Knight
It's a really good idea. It's actually Charlotte, not me. Because Charlie drinks tea.
- [101:34]
Bella Freud
Sounds like such a good rumor to go with good. River, you're brilliant.
- [101:38]
Nick Knight
There's a room around. I have an umbrella to match each suit I have, which is true. And they're all different shades of these. I mean I have a lot of suits. A lot of suits. And of course I know the difference between mid grade 9 and mid grade 10. Today we're being. We are wearing mid gray 10. I would never wear light gray to an interview like this. I never wear dark gray. I have a whole range of little tiny details that nobody else knows, nobody else cares about more. 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. 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'll 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 composure compositions. So I think very much in terms of music 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 than words that come naturally when trying to describe my own process, I think I'm probably synesthetic, which is where you mix up, you know, you taste color or see sound or whatever.
- [103:26]
Bella Freud
Yeah.
- [103:27]
Nick Knight
So I think I probably have some cedar cesia knocking around within me, which I find utterly fascinating. And I get very fascinated by all those things which we don't understand about ourselves. Dyslexia, synesthesia, dyspraxia. All those sort of things I think is what I can't remember who said it was superpowers, but they probably are. So all those sorts of things I find really exciting. So my pleasure I get from composing my environment, which. Which is a sort of lost battle really, because the environment doesn't stay composed, but 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. Yeah, but as I said, having 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 Cornwall because that's different situation. Or I put it in studio, in show studio because that's 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 it would just draw and we'd put them all around the house because I thought it was joyous. So I don't get displeasure in that way from lack of order or chaos. I just get pleasure from. From order and, you know, putting things in rows, 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.
- [105:01]
Bella Freud
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, for.
- [105:11]
Nick Knight
Well, it's been lovely speaking to you. I hope it's been interesting to listen to.
- [105:15]
Bella Freud
It has been totally riveting. Thank you so much.
- [105:19]
Nick Knight
Well, it's absolutely my pleasure, Val. Thank you.