Nick Knight: Avant-Garde Glamour, Tech Pioneer, and the Gear Behind the Image
Nick Knight (b. 1958, London) is a celebrated fashion photographer, filmmaker, and founder of SHOWstudio.com, known for redefining fashion imagery across decades—whether directing music videos for Björk and Kanye West or crafting conceptual portraiture exhibited worldwide.
The Gear Story—Evolving with Vision
10×8 Polaroid & Large-Format Film (1980s–2000s)
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Knight began with 10×8 large-format Polaroid and sheet film—allowing him to create monumental test images. Though the film is now obsolete, he continues to maintain large-format workflows when needed.
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He used a custom ring-like rig of Broncolor strobes—a pentagonal array of light heads—for campaign shoots, creating expansive highlight reflections and precise controlled shadows.
Medium Format & Transition to Digital
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As film availability declined, Knight embraced digital capture—using Medium-Format digital backs and high-resolution scanners to continue shooting large-scale images for print and lightbox presentation.
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He paired this with layered digital retouch workflows, building on techniques pioneered with Brian Dowling at BDI to extend tonal control and image depth.
Live & Digital Media
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Knight was among the first fashion photographers to live-stream shoots and use video as a primary form—often using jib-mounted digital systems and cinema-style lighting to frame motion as fashion storytelling
What He Says About Gear
Finding out what was used to capture an image is about as interesting as knowing what pen you used to write it… What matters is what you say in the piece.”
— Knight emphasizing that gear serves storytelling, not the other way around
Why His Tools Reflected His Vision
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Using large-format film allowed Knight to create painterly textures and monumental prints.
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His shift to digital and film scanning enabled greater experimentation, layering, and collaborative editing—aligned with his forward-looking fashion-theater sensibility.
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The Broncolor pentagonal rig and ring-style lighting helped create his signature look: glossy, sculptural, dramatic, but still deeply intimate.
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His embrace of live-streaming and film direction through SHOWstudio expanded his visual storytelling beyond stills into immersive narrative formats.
Signature Works & Visual Identity
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Knight’s 1992 Jil Sander campaign (featuring Tatjana Patitz) later sold for a record sum as hand-coated pigment prints—evidence of how his technical and aesthetic choices made fashion art.
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His direction of music videos—Björk’s Pagan Poetry, Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, Kanye West’s Bound 2/Black Skinhead—reflects his cinematic and artistic vision beyond fashion.
Final Insight
For Nick Knight, gear is neither fetish nor limitation—it’s a means. Whether shooting on 10×8 Polaroid, rigging Broncolor lights in expressive arrays, or staging digital fashion films live on SHOWstudio, Knight consistently tailored his tools to shape how the image speaks.
His career shows that mastery lies in using gear to amplify vision—not letting it define it.