Nick Knight, techno-shaman

LONDON, United Kingdom — There are many things you can call Nick Knight: optimist, artist, iconoclast. But the one label he would rather you no longer attached to him is the most obvious one, the one by which the world knows and reveres him. That is, of course: photographer. His mind is fixed so firmly on the future that old world classifications are meaningless to him. And yet, Knight’s forward-thinking radicalism is placed at the service of a very deep and traditional humanism. There isn’t a morsel of dystopia in his vision. He believes passionately in a better world for all, in the primal power of human connection, in the joy of creation. His website SHOWstudio is a temple to human creativity in the Internet Age and has earned Knight another label: high priest, or maybe techno-shaman, opening doors to different realities, transmogrifying perceptions in the most visceral way, and all the while, he himself is the tall, elegant apogee of the Savile Row gentleman.

Tim Blanks sits down with Nick Knight to talk creativity in a connected world.

Tim Blanks: Do you think photography is an ideal medium for making
connections?

Nick Knight: Well, I have to preface that by saying I think photography is dead. I think photography stopped years ago and we shouldn’t try and hold back a new medium by defining it with old terms. We can do things that [Eadweard] Muybridge or [Richard] Avedon or [Robert] Mapplethorpe could never do because they are so far outside their particular craft. It’s a very easy set of parameters that join Muybridge to Mapplethorpe, [Eugène] Atget to Avedon. For 150 years they did the same thing. Then something else comes along at the end of the 1980s and you could do things you could never do before. And now we’re much further down the line than that. Now I can take an iPhone and form a sculpture. And some people are still calling it photography.

TB: What do you call it then?

NK: I call it image-making — please could someone get a better description of it — because that’s what I do. Because that can take in sound and movement and 3D, which I think are really part of this new art form. So it’s based on image. That gets away from the thing of truth. Photography has been saddled as the medium of truth for so many years. That’s where its criticism has always been directed, “This photograph has been manipulated.” At the New York Times, you can’t have retouching because retouching is somehow cheating. I’m very pleased that image-making has freed itself from those constraints. It’s a totally new medium and that’s what I think I do.

TB: It’s all magic realism in a way. Storytelling round the digital campfire.

NK: And some of those stories are incredible and they’re probably the same basic stories that have been told around campfires forever because they all have to do with the human condition.

TB: So what was, is and always will be. Is it less about finding new things than about reconnecting with things we’ve lost touch with?

NK: No, we must be creating new things. We must be evolving as a species. We can’t be the same physically and emotionally as we were 500 years ago. We’re no longer chimpanzees, but we’re not where we’re going to be. Although they are the same stories, we’re not exactly the same people.

TB: There are some things you can’t get around — like birth and death — but I guess they’re changing as well.

NK: Certainly, you have image-making that prolongs life and prolongs that emotional connection. If you’ve been in love with somebody you go back to that picture and they come back to you. Historically photography and image-making have done that. And I’m super excited about the idea that we can leave some imprint of ourselves that at some point can be regenerated.

TB: Digital residue.

NK: That doesn’t sound so attractive. We leave something or we create something as we are going through this world, which I don’t think disappears. And maybe it’s something that does prolong life, so we are outside the framework of birth and death.

TB: With the frustration of physical limitations. We perceive three dimensions but physics recognises so many more. We use a small percentage of our brain. Do you see technology becoming our passport to the rest?

NK: Image-wise, I’m looking at a new dimension, and there’s a lot more to come. I think there’s something completely different on the horizon, maybe 10 years away based on the speed with which it’s happening. We need to free ourselves from the past, not because I don’t like the past, but we should focus on the future and then make it happen more quickly. Things like leaving a spiritual imprint on the world or responding to each other in ways we’re not in control of or not knowing how our heart and chest are thinking as much as our head — these are things we need to start thinking about using in the creation of imagery.

Get Tne full conversation on BUSINESS OF FASHION

Nick Knight, Techno-Shaman