END FRAME
NICK KNIGHT’S ALCHEMY
© both images Nick kNight/ truNkarchive.com
As he expl Ains in this month’s “how i Got
that shot,” photographer timothy saccenti
loves to manipulate the properties of light,
time and chemistry that make up photography.
his curiosity inspired the “mad-scientist-type
experiments” that lead to the techniques he
describes in “tricky lights Up” (page 82), and
it’s behind his admiration for the innovative
work of photographer nick Knight. Knight, who
briefly studied biology in college before decid-
ing he preferred photography, brings a rest-
less experimentation to all his projects, from
fashion work for Dior, Jil sander, Vogue and V,
to his collaboration with the natural history
museum in london.
saccenti says he was in high school in new
Jersey when he first saw a Knight photo, an im-
age for designer Yohji Yamamoto. “that’s when
i decided i wanted to do photography,” he says.
“i’d never seen anything like it.”
over the years, saccenti has continued to be
fascinated by Knight’s fashion stories. he par-
ticularly appreciates the way Knight juxtaposes
beautiful fashion photos with an x-ray image
or a Kirlian photograph, created with a tech-
nique that uses a transparent electrode to send
voltage through an inanimate object, igniting
particles around it and exposing the film. After
Knight photographed the collection of flow-
ers at london’s natural history museum for his
book, Flora, “he was taking flowers and put-
ting them in liquid nitrogen to freeze them and
exploding them. that was fascinating to me,”
saccenti recalls.
Above: A rose frozen in liquid
nitrogen and then shot with a
bullet. Left: Naomi Campbell
from V magazine.
