Nick Knight CBE – Homogenic by Bjork

What inspired you to get into to image-making?

Nick: "It wasn't through anything so artistic or dramatic. Originally, I wanted to be a doctor. That was where I was going. And when I got to university, I decided that really wasn't where I wanted to go. And just almost by chance, I'd taken an A-level in photography to sort of fill in units on a course, and I found I really liked doing photography. I thought it was an exciting way to be able to just live in a way. 

I remember thinking to myself “You're supposed to be doing something you really enjoy.”  I had no artistic training whatsoever, so I thought, well, I don't know if I'll get on with this, but I’ll give it everything I've got, and it wasn't a hardship, I loved doing it. I invested myself into it at 100% so that I could give it my best shot and I loved finding about old photographers, I loved seeing what other people were doing, all that sort of stuff and an introduction to art.

I knew virtually nothing about art, and all of a sudden I’m learning about the vast world of art going back to, you know, Byzantine and beyond and culture in every form suddenly opens up to you and it's, of course, incredible. So it was a fairly easy slope in and I became totally absorbed."

How did you end up working with Alexander McQueen and Bjork on the album cover?

Nick: "Well, I'd known Lee McQueen [Alexander McQueen] for some years, and we worked together and shared ideas back and forth, which was a very healthy, creative relationship. I had done a photograph with him, and Bjork had seen it, and she reached out to work together on her album cover Homogenic and she had this idea that she wanted to be sort of at the bottom of the sea and the pressure of the sea on her and she wanted to have sort of barbels like a catfish and all these sorts of things.

Lee [McQueen] had a very, very, very, very, very short attention span, very short. So Bjork got herself done up and Lee came in, she came in, he positioned her, she stood in front of the camera, I clicked the first shot to do the film and then very quickly we reloaded the Polaroid and clicked that, up comes the Polaroid, you develop it instantly, I put it on the table in front of Bjork and Lee and he said, "That's great, I'm going to go, bye,” and he's gone, literally gone. But that was what he was like and that was what made him in a way so incredible and also in a way so feared because people don't work that quickly, and with that confidence. And he was completely right: Bjork had got herself all dolled up so Bjork and I stayed and we worked together for another three or four hours just trying to take another picture and another Polaroid and we never got it as right as that very first shot. I think that's the only time in my career that's ever happened to me.

So, you know, it's a funny picture in a way because of that story, but that story reveals very clearly the sort of mindset of Alexander McQueen. He could see things just so much more quickly than anybody else, which I think led to his frustration in life, because he was always having to wait for people to catch up to his ideas, where he could see them so clearly. And he could never really understand why other people couldn't see them as spontaneously and as clearly as he could. So yeah, it's a nice picture in that way, because it does bring together that particular moment."

What was it like working with Bjork?

Nick: "I’ve worked with Bjork many times, and she is spectacularly performative. So she doesn’t just come in and sit there to get her photo taken, she moves and she twists and shapes her body in ways that most people wouldn’t think to do. Most people would just sit down in front of the camera and position their body in the way that they think people want to see them, but Bjork has none of those preconceptions about what beauty is. So she throws herself into a session and will do everything in that session to offer you different ideas, different thoughts, and she's not frightened of doing anything, and she's very experimental with her own look. You know that when you work with her, you're going to come out with something which is going to be amazing.

Lady Gaga has a similar sort of approach to image making. If you work with her, she will give everything, absolutely everything to get the picture. When I was doing the “Born This Way’ sessions, she worked all the way through the day, all the way through the night, all the way through the following day, and all the way through the following night. You know, there aren’t many people who will do that. It wasn’t even me asking her to do it – that's her not stopping. She just lives her life in front of the camera.

So you do sort of find that you know there are people like Bjork or Lady Gaga who actually exist just to get that picture and they will go through whatever it takes to get it and they are incredible to work with. I've ever got a session with somebody like that and with Bjork or with Gaga or whoever it is, you really look forward to it 'cause you know that you can really, really push. There's nothing worse as an image maker to sit in front of somebody and you feel that they don't wanna be there, that they're kind of like “when is it just gonna finish, why is it taking so long? Do I have to pose like that?” It’s the people who invest themselves in the image that you get the best picture of because they also want the best picture and they will do what it takes to get it in terms of being really inventive with their posing and really imaginative and understanding what you're seeing"

Where did the inspiration for using a kimono in the shoot come from?

Nick: "I think it was probably because Alexander McQueen was, quite rightly, very influenced by Japanese culture. Back in the 90’s, Japan wasn’t as heavily visited by people from the West as it is today, so many had a sort of slightly mythical vision of it. I had been many times, and so had Lee McQueen, and he was incredibly taken with Japanese culture. He'd worked with the Japanese designer Rei Koububo from "Comme des Garçon" And they'd done a collaboration of which I'd created an image for, which had a kimono in it, or some similar kimono-esque style of garment. And I think Bjork had seen the image from that, and that's what she wanted to do but also it was part of Lee's investigation into different cultures and looking at Japanese culture and some of the aesthetics of it and, you know, never to just reproduce it, but always just to try and find some way for that sort of cross-cultural pollination which happens all the time."

You can see Bjork's album cover for 'Homogenic' in Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk, on display until January 5th 2025.