When I first met Nick Knight in a hotel in the backstreets of Montmartre, I couldn't help thinking 'so, this is him?" I guess I was expecting something a little more...well, you know...glitzy, from the man who slammed postmodern glam onto glossy pages from Arena to Vogue to i-D.

Despite his high fashion profile, the 38 year old Londoner looks like your average guy, perhaps a well dressed academic maybe. But the mild mannered exterior is something of a ploy, the cloak of anonymity which allows him to

"Photography has nothing to do with reality at all."

voyage freely through a world whose franca lingua is your Look. "I want people to think I'm a nice young man" he joked, "that way, they don't suspect what I'm up to." What he's up to, and has been for almost 20 years, is the distilling of much-prized essential oils. Image oils. Just like a still (photograph) which extracts the essence of a given substance, Nick dives in deep to pull out what is fundamental from whatever is set before him: a skinhead, a button, a top model, a rose.

Maybe it's his Biology background, or the rebellion of his bovverboy days, but whatever it is that informs his vision, Yohji Yamamoto summed it up best when he said that Nick "can see an invisible crack in the world. His images are his own view of the world which he has separated along the crack. His personal view became universal because it was real."