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After decades of trailblazing designer shoots, Nick Knight has pronounced photography 'dead'. Nevertheless, the artist is at the forefront of a technological revolution in how fashion is consumed. Peter Simpson meets the man behind Lane Crawford's latest campaigns
This obscure envy flashes across my mind as I walk through the upmarket London borough of Belgravia looking for Knight's SHOWstudio - The Home of Fashion Film. The photographer behind Lane Crawford's autumn-winter 2012 and spring-summer 2013 advertising campaigns burst onto the scene in 1982 with his seminal book , which offered rare insight into the British working-class subculture.
Almost every British council-housing estate in the late 1970s and early 80s had a resident group of skinheads and each had a leader: the biggest and meanest among them, with the shortest hair and the crudest India-ink tattoos. They wore pressed, checked, buttoned-down shirts or Fred Perry polos; bold braces over their shoulders or flapping around the buttocks; jeans bleached with an industrial attitude and a Harrington black or military green flight jacket. In winter, perhaps a Crombie coat. Then there was the signature footwear - highly shined Dr Martens boots with come-to-kick-you laces criss-crossing from just behind the toes to mid-shin.
Flicking through Knight's book ahead of our interview, the minacious garb and spiky heads triggered hard-forgotten memories. On my estate, the chief skin was Tony Paris and when he walked down our street, solo or with smaller skins in tow, we other kids ran for cover, porch doors swinging on their hinges and a high-noon eerie silence enveloping the area.
Unless you were one, you avoided skinheads at all costs, hiding behind bus shelters or your bigger mates - even your mum. But not Knight. This nice, middle-class boy from the peaceful lands of gravel drives and sculptured privets went out of his way to befriend skinheads and document them with his camera. He dived right into their den - London's East End - and Oi!, the loud, late-70s reprise of the original skinhead movement, from a decade earlier.
Knight clicked away exposing their street cred, style and ideology. Critics applauded him, calling his work "art".
"I actually found the skinhead girls really sexy," says Knight, as I relay my childhood trauma and we climb to the top of his five-storey studio and gallery. "The book launched me. It was a rite of passage. I now have three children, so I'm acutely aware of the time between childhood and adulthood, which needs some sort of demarcation.
