Nick Knight and the Death of Photography

One year ago, Nick Knight proclaimed, "I think photography is dead" when he self-referenced during a livestreamed interview for the series Fashion Pioneers with The Business of Fashion. Taken out of context, it's a stunning statement considering he's tirelessly and fearlessly pushing the boundaries of what his chosen medium can be, and his unrivaled online creative home, Showstudio, is arguably the most groundbreaking and prolific showcase of fashion imagery and the processes behind it, a marriage of photography and film, much of it in collaboration with in-house filmmaker Ruth Hogben and guest favourites (Alice Hawkins is always a massive treat). To that he added, “Film died some years ago. I don’t miss it. None of my children read magazines. Fashion will be shaped by the internet.”

Watching the whole interview - it's 4o+ minutes and well worth the time - is crucial to understanding the context of his statements which you want to do because it's better than reading excerpts and thinking someone you admire is hopelessly arrogant. He's not; rather he has the kind of humility only those who achieve great things acquire. His message, drawn out by the quietly astute Imran Amed, is that the way to move fashion forward is to create new, dynamic and groundbreaking fashion experiences that use our available technology to offer access to everyone who wants it (eg. watching Alexander McQueen's Plato's Atlantis on our mobiles), and therefore media such as photography and film must evolve beyond what traditional means can accommodate. Knight observes that, in this sense, photography "has become something else" altogether (hence "photography is dead"), and he's leading the revolution in taking fashion to this open place, beyond the fashion elite. (I've always thought fashion was wasted on a good number of the privileged insiders - bored faces at Chanel haute couture shows are as sure a sight as Lesage embellished boucle.)

At the time of this interview, no other image maker was following Knight's lead or cutting their own path in any meaningful way. The vision wasn't there. Has that changed in the past year? I can't think of anyone.

The images here are Knight's contribution to the January issue of W magazine. They are blowing me away. They are like photography, illustration and film all in one - I believe he directed a film and took stills to create the series which is drawn from the work of Erté, Aubrey Beardsley, Lillian Bassman and Irina Ionesco "to explore the future-fantastic visions of Spring/Summer 2012" for W. I think the imagery trumps the subject which is the clothes. Yet in 30 years of creating fashion imagery, Knight has never lost focus of why he's there, and I find that fascinating.

You can see all of the images, both published and previously unpublished, at Showstudio.