Nick Knight has used an iPhone and photographic technology to create romantic images that recall 17th century paintings
Despite having turned his lens on everyone from Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell to the late, great Alexander McQueen and Kanye West – as well as Malala for this month’s British Vogue – the self-described image maker Nick Knight is finding inspiration a little closer to home these days – in his own garden to be exact.
The 62-year old world-renowned fashion photographer started photographing roses he’d cut from the garden of the little house that used to belong to his parents in 2013, simply pointing and shooting with his iPhone before uploading the pictures to Instagram.
“They seemed to be quite popular, and I enjoyed doing it,” he tells i. “I’m normally working with a designer or an art director, but this is very solitary – nobody else is asking me anything and the rose isn’t getting bored and asking to leave.”
As the years passed and the iPhones’ cameras improved, Knight refined his process. After selecting just one of the thousands of photos he can snap during a four-hour sitting at his kitchen table, he applies an Instagram filter (either Sierra or Hudson for the initiated, though he also dabbles with Ludwig) and plays around with colour and contrast before running the image through Topaz Labs, AI photography software that sharpens unfocused areas, and spending hours poring over the composite picture with his retoucher Mark.
“After we did the first one I was really surprised at what it had done to the image,” he says. “If you step back and look at these images they’re very reminiscent of the Dutch flower painters of the 17th century, there’s a romance to them: they’re soft and gentle.
“But if you stand close to them, you can inspect the structure the AI has invented and see they’re actually quite mechanical, brutal and tough. And I love that.
“You can tell the oldest pictures in the exhibition by the quality of the camera, if you look closely you can see how the definition of the petals have changed and become softer. I’m slightly worried the iPhone is getting a little too contrasting and vivid for its own good – that sort of subtlety you could achieve a couple of iPhones ago was probably better, but I’m not sure.
“Interestingly, I rarely shoot red roses because they’re very hard to photograph. Red doesn’t carry the depth of emotion therefore that all the other colours do. My favourite colours tend to be the lighters ones because I’ll take them darker and you’ll get different hues of the colours within them.”
The resulting dreamy, intensely beautiful series, Roses from my Garden, is currently on display at the Coach House Gallery in the grounds of Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, the Neo-Renaissance estate built by champion of the arts Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the 1800s.
Knight’s clear delight in using technology to create pictures that wouldn’t look out of place in the National Gallery would send shivers down the spines of more conservative art historians and collectors: not that he cares. While photography has always been the people’s medium and the rise of smartphones has democratised the medium further, it hasn’t become devalued in the way nay-sayers would have us believe, he insists.
“We’ve all got pens, but not all of us are dashing out War and Peace every day,” he points out. “When I first started using my iPhone, I would get quite heavy abuse on social media… there was a strong reaction against it and I couldn’t work out why – we’re just creating images. I’m not actually a great lover of cameras, they’re normally just annoying plastic and glass that gets in the way between you and the person you want to take an image of.”
“Photography really did become democratised through digital and through mobile phones but I think there is this demonisation of things that get stuck in our psyche, and one of these demonisations is that we’re surrounded by a barrage of photographers and that photography’s been made baseless and worthless. But a lot of people are now able to express themselves visually, which I think is so important. People really don’t understand what it means to express themselves through images – they’re used to writing and to speaking, but before we were writing we were scratching buffalo on cave walls. I think it’s undervalued.”
Similarly, the backlash against editing photographs and treating Photoshop as a manipulative tool that lies to us is also misplaced, he maintains, pointing out that by insisting images should better society, we’re handicapping artists by preventing them from expressing themselves fully and creating false narratives around what is and isn’t art.
An image from ‘Roses from my Garden, Nick Knight at Waddesdon (Photo courtesy of Nick Knight/Albion Barn)
“Photography is often blamed, unfairly and incorrectly, in my opinion,” he says. “People are so distrustful of Photoshop, as if it’s some way of making people feel bad, that they’re being lied to. Even the word manipulation is negative, it’s one of the words that Kanye would cross out in the dictionary when he was taking out the bad words.
“Photography is a fantasy, there is no reality. So, the idea that photography, or image making, is in any way an abstract version of truth, is false. Photographers who are really good at their craft manipulate everything, because of course they do. All the great painters manipulate with their vision because you don’t want to see reality from me – you want to see what I see that you can’t see. That’s what makes it exciting.”
