Nigel Shafran
The British artist is a walking enigma, and that’s exactly how he likes it

His images are renowned for their striking, everyday simplicity and are now sought after by gallerists and fashion houses alike. But Nigel always manages a degree of playful diffidence. Nobody’s ever sure if the joke’s on them. He kind of loves the glitziness of art-world recognition and fashion hoo-ha. But he also sort of hates it. He’s happy to use his personal life as the source material for his work (his wife, Ruth, on the phone; piles of washing up), but he’s also incredibly secretive. Remarkably for a man who doesn’t like talking about himself and has little interest in fame, the following profile runs to nearly 6,000 words. That’s because there’s so much to read into his images.
From Fantastic Man n° 39 — 2024
Story by EMILY KING
Portraits by WOLFGANG TILLMANS
Reference photos by NIGEL SHAFRAN

The Spice Girls
‘The Guardian Weekend Magazine’, 1997
I still remember the arrival of that issue of the ‘The Guardian Weekend Magazine’. Showing the feet, but not the faces, of the best-known women in Britain at the time was a coup equivalent in magnitude to getting brilliant feminist author Kathy Acker to profile the band. The image and the text were in perfect accord. Acker recorded the torrent of statements and opinions that flowed from the five young women, while steering clear of the stereotypes that went with their epithets Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger and Posh. Meanwhile, through his imagery, Nigel Shafran hinted at the self-conscious construction of the Spice Girls’ “personalities.” The photograph was a commissioned work, but it has a quality that is key to the images that Nigel publishes in his own photobooks, that of concentrating on the periphery.
Nigel’s regular collaborator, Dutch graphic designer Linda van Deursen, put the picture on the back cover of ‘The Well’, a quasi-chronological survey of largely, but not exclusively, his commissioned work that was published in 2022. She also included a photograph of Nigel with the band that was taken by Kathy Acker herself. “There’s a story there,” says Linda. “Kathy Acker wanted to have a picture of herself with the Spice Girls, but Nigel didn’t want to put another roll of film in his camera. He really regrets that now.” This story is in the book too.
Nigel’s Spice Girls picture was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 2017 and is currently on display in Gallery 28, the ‘Making the Modern World’ gallery, alongside a Wolfgang Tillmans photo of Peter Saville and one of PJ Harvey by Mario Sorrenti. To an extent, Nigel has been absorbed into the establishment, but in spite of this, or maybe because of it, his self-presentation is resolutely “anti.” When I visit him at his dark room in London Fields, I arrive at a building with several doors and a bewildering selection of bells, some of which look as though, were you rash enough to try them, they might electrocute you. The area has been gentrified to an almost absurd extent since Nigel first rented here over two decades ago, but his building seems to have resisted that pull. Ringing the less risky bells and asking around, I finally locate Nigel in a windowless lair that is filled with large pieces of photographic equipment and decorated with a few prints, both by him and others, and mysteries such as white socks clipped to a red washing line. Nigel makes me tea using milk he has brought to the space in a small Tupperware container, and we settle down to talk – me on a chair he found on the street, him crossed-legged on a stool (he has been doing yoga lately).
How long have you had this space? “Ohh, I don’t know – I shared it with a couple of people – now they’re gone.” I realise that, as with the images, this interview is going to be a case of working around the edges. Nigel is apparently uncomfortable addressing his biography head on, yet over time he gives things away. Similarly, if you pay careful attention to his published work, you can assemble his story through fragments.
A few days later, I return to the building to celebrate the launch of ‘Workbooks’, another book designed by Linda and published with Loose Joints, the photography publisher with whom they collaborated on ‘The Well’. The book shows Nigel’s workbooks from 1984, when he was just 20, until the present, and its launch also doubles as a default 60th birthday celebration. To supplement the delicious, decisively contemporary, non-specific Mediterranean food provided by his friend, chef Elaine Chalmers, Nigel has stuck party packs of Wotsits crisps to the wall with black tape. The neon light in the entry hall has been mitigated with translucent red tape, the roll still hanging down. Nigel bounces around among guests, including his long-term collaborator, model Cecilia Chancellor (apparently untouched by time), and his childhood friends, artist Henry Krokatsis and photographer David Spero. Also there are colleagues, neighbours and numerous fashion types, young and old, all dressed with an appropriate degree of grunge. As I leave, Nigel has taken over running the bar and is mixing up a tequila-based drink. Later I hear that he DJ-d until the early hours. To me, a near contemporary of Nigel’s, it was partying like it was 1992.
Ruth with pills
London, W10, 1994
Growing up in north London, Nigel went to a Jewish primary school, Hasmonean Primary in Hendon, followed by Christ’s College, a grammar school in Finchley. “It was alright. My art teacher was good, actually. He helped me; he suggested I take up photography,” says Nigel. “But I just started drinking and smoking, and I gave up.” After leaving school, Nigel embarked on a stint working as an assistant to various fashion photographers in New York.
Who did you work for? “You name them, I got sacked by them.” So you didn’t do a BA? You never went to art college? “No, New York was my art college, from ’84 to almost ’86. Then I got deported.” How come New York? “My mum was living in Palm Springs. I went over there, and I begged her to let me stop off in New York on the way home. She found a friend I could stay with for a few days, and, on the second day, I went to this agent with my 35mm slides. I don’t know why he would even bother seeing me! And that evening I got a call from a photographer, Deborah Turbeville, who invited me to the hotel where she was staying on Broadway and said, ‘Do you want to come and help me on a job?’ The next day, she was shooting in Central Park, like in one of those townhouses, for Italian ‘Vogue’. I was the most excited I have ever been. She was memorably kind to me. I came back to London, then I went back to New York with my friend Simon [Fleury]. And we both lived there until I got deported for working illegally. So yeah. Enough about me!” This is all going to be about you!
On his return to London, Nigel started making pictures for the style press – ‘The Face’ and ‘i-D’ – and in the early 1990s he met his partner, Ruth. She was studying photography at the Royal College of Art, and the connection was through friends of Nigel’s who were her fellow students. In 1995 he published the photographic love letter, ‘Ruthbook’. Among the images is one of Ruth wrapped in a blue towelling dressing gown, standing in their bedroom with her slipper-footed legs crossed and her left hand to her chin, looking at the photographer with an “if you must” expression. It is a wry yet intimate portrait that Nigel’s friend and occasional editor Liz Jobey remembers as the image that opened her eyes to Nigel’s work. “Ruth is always there in Nigel’s pictures,” says Liz. “Ruth on the phone, Ruth doing the laundry.”

“I think he had a disordered childhood, an emotionally chaotic upbringing, and Ruth must have saved him from that,” says Nigel’s friend and next-door neighbour, graphic designer Huw Morgan. Huw also suggests that Nigel’s work was a retreat: “He built his own dark room aged 16 and that became his sanctuary, so it’s not a surprise that his life and his work are so intertwined.”
“It’s kind of extraordinary, the self-taught thing,” continues Huw. “Ruth is a really significant part of his world. She allowed him to segue into the ‘taught’ world of photography – for him, the observation of that world was enough.” Although she no longer publishes work, Ruth is an accomplished photographer herself. Her work ‘In bed with Mum and Dad’, a compellingly gentle image taken in a mirror of Ruth at the end of a bed, partly obscured by a large camera and flanked by her pyjamaed parents, was included in the annual ‘New Contemporaries’ exhibition in 1994.
‘Ruthbook’ marked a turning point for Nigel. He sent it to the photography curators at the Victoria & Albert Museum and was called in for a meeting. “I remember, there was Mark Haworth-Booth, Charlotte Cotton and Martin Barnes, and they said, ‘Yeah, go do what you do.’ And they bought all the prints for £250. And, in a way, that really helped me. It validated me.”
Ruth’s constant presence in Nigel’s work lends her a kind of celebrity. Introduced to her at the ‘Workbooks’ launch party, I found myself experiencing the kind of shyness that comes on when you feel you know all about a person, yet they know nothing of you. When I meet her for the second time, at her and Nigel’s house, she tells me that she has been recognised, but only at the Photographers’ Gallery. Like Ruth, Nigel’s home is familiar to anyone who follows his work. There is the laundry drying on a rack – a blues wash when I was there – and the arrangements of domestic paraphernalia: pot plants, water filters, plastic containers, a net of toy dinosaurs, a pineapple.
6 February 2000
Bagels and Marmite, falafel with Glancy, potato and leek soup, bagel, banana cream and maple syrup, 2000

Another of Nigel’s frequent collaborators, stylist Alex Harrington, says that the ‘Washing-up’ series are his current Nigel favourites. “It’s not a series I would have picked eight years ago, but now, at this stage in my life, I love that you could find beauty in something so mundane, so universal.” There’s a tension between order and chaos in these pictures, specifically in ‘6 February 2000’, there’s an overstuffed rack that looks as if, were one piece to be removed, the whole thing would tumble. When I put the order/chaos question to Alex he replies, “Oh, it’s definitely order – the washing up is all done. It’s complete.”
Living alongside Nigel and Ruth for over 20 years, Huw and his wife, artist Sophie Smallhorn, have observed this balance at close quarters. “They create order in different ways. Ruth creates the beautiful garden and the allotment, then Nigel creates order through framing things, the way he lays things out on a shelf,” says Sophie. “Their house is full of objects that are well loved and well worn. If you borrow a tripod from Nigel it will be a 1960s Russian tripod he bought from eBay that is covered in stickers and held together with string.”
“Ruth has made a life that is consistent and ordered: the house, the holidays in the van, her family,” continues Sophie. “And Nigel’s life is spent trying to make sense of the minutiae, trying to make sense of the world and himself. To me, he’s the photographer you never see with a camera. He never seems to have a camera, yet somehow he has documented our lives here over the last 20 years.”
A few years ago Nigel and Ruth bought a house in north Devon, and Nigel is recording the process of domestication. “I was thinking that this is going to be the next book,” he says, showing me an image. “That’s the packaging for the new saucepans, lined up.” Nigel admits to coming from a middle-class home, yet he is still apparently uncomfortable with his latter-day good fortune. At one point he expresses anxiety at the extravagance of a £15 yoga session. “I have to do it. My back wouldn’t function otherwise.” It sounds quite reasonable to me. “But for some people, that’s the electric bill – I am going: ‘La la la, coffee after?’” Perhaps by showing the edges of his comfortable life, the receipts and the packaging, he is trying to make peace with its centre. “You know what I like?” he asks. “I like the pictures you do for the insurance company, or whatever. I mean that, though it’s a stupid thing to say!”
Nigel showed the ‘Washing-up 2000’ photographs at ‘fig-1’, a series of 50 exhibitions that took place in London over 50 weeks at the turn of the millennium. Asked if he would like another gallery exhibition, he demurs. “It’s all so posh: well-spoken people saying things like, ‘What an amazing opportunity to buy a seminal work,’ and I think, ‘Fuck off.’” But later he adds, “I would like an exhibition, actually. Maybe I could turn my career in a different direction. As you get older you become a commodified thing, and don’t we fucking deserve it, after killing ourselves for all these years?”
Avenue Montaigne
British ‘Vogue’, April 2014
“This one here, I can’t believe they let me do this,” says Nigel. “I had this idea, but thought, ‘No fucking way they’re gonna let me do that.’ So I said, ‘Oh, can we just quickly try this with her praying to these mannequins?’ For some reason, they actually got the guy out of the Chanel shop to hold this umbrella over her. And I think they’ve used this picture subsequently, going, ‘Great! You could get the latest dress!’ But in my mind, it’s like fashion as a fake god.”
“The image of a girl kneeling with the umbrella above her head – to me this is an image Luis Buñuel could have made. It comes from a really autonomous mind,” says graphic designer Linda. First meeting through their mutual friend, artist Paul Elliman, Linda and Nigel stayed in touch and worked together from time to time, with her commissioning him, him asking her for help with books. “At one point,” says Linda, “he showed me what he did for British ‘Vogue’: photographs of all these girls performing the act of shopping, and I said, ‘Hey, what is that?!’ Then I tried to convince him to make a book about his fashion work, but he said ‘over my dead body! I don’t want to be known for my commercial work!’ But I said, ‘Your position is so extraordinary.’ I had to convince him of it – I told him that every great photographer had done fashion work.” She did a good job, because at one point in our conversations, Nigel lists some of the greats who have worked in fashion: “Garry Winogrand, Walker Evans, Larry Sultan, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank.”
Given his general ambivalence, however, I ask him why he entered that world in the first place. “I grew up in that area,” he says. “I just veered towards the world of fashion, perhaps because I didn’t know any better. I have this theory: you know those indie bands, where the words were so important and the lyrics worked on for such a long time?” Like who? “Echo & the Bunnymen or The Teardrop Explodes, say. Then there’s disco, where the music comes first and they go, ‘Quick we need some lyrics!’ So you get: ‘Oh, my baby did this.’ Because it was done on the hop and it was so unimportant, it just flowed without a filter. There is something about that that I really like. Sometimes it’s better just to let things flow through you, without sitting down to think of a ‘good’ set of pictures. Whenever I do that, they just look a bit shit.”

For the last nine years or so, Nigel has been working regularly with Alex Harrington. “Our first shoot, everyone hated. It was in my apartment in New York and we sat on the floor, bonding over losing a sibling,” says Alex. Nigel’s sister died in her mid-forties after long-term addiction issues. “Luckily, though, ‘Vogue’ came back, and every once in a while Anna [Wintour] feels there’s space for the kind of storytelling that Nigel brings to the magazine,” Alex continues. “Then it’s a case of pointing him in a direction – it will be either a theme or a mood – and he will sit with the idea. He ideates; he draws pictures, which are really bad! Depending on how insane they are, we will show 75 per cent of them to Anna. She really likes them.”
I have seen Nigel’s drawings and can’t imagine Anna Wintour, whom I know only by repute, being into them. I put this to Alex, who says, “She says, in a weird way, they remind her of Irving Penn. I saw some of Irving Penn’s notebooks in an exhibition once and, in fact, they are very similar.” Even so, I find it hard to picture Anna Wintour and Nigel’s interactions. “They actually have a lot in common,” Alex tells me. “They have a British sensibility. There is a whimsy, and, it might seem crazy to say, a bohemianism.”
“Sometimes things sit on a razor’s edge,” says Alex, “Like the image of Bella Hadid dressed as a petrol pump (‘Vogue’, February 2020). I mean, who is the joke on? On you, the reader? On the subject? On the publication? Or are we all in on the joke together? It’s layered. You have been seduced, we’re all going down this road together, and then he starts taking the piss.” Neighbour Huw tells me that the petrol-pump outfit originated as a fancy dress costume for which Nigel borrowed a length of pipe from him. Huw was bemused to see it end up on the pages of ‘Vogue’ some months later. “For me, Nigel’s work is all about juxtapositions,” he says. “And perhaps Nigel in fashion is the most extraordinary juxtaposition.”
When I tell friends and colleagues of Nigel’s that I am writing about him, several of them use the word “player.” As in, either he is a player, or he’s not a player. Some people say both, one after the other. I put the question to Alex, and he says, “He is, though he’ll admit that fashion is transactional, there’s always a degree of knowing. The models need a touch of the ‘art’ context, and he’s shooting a luxury item, which opens up opportunities for him.” Nigel’s friend, photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, who works across similar territory, jokes that Nigel is “obsessed.”
“Before we were really friends, he wrote in a book of mine: ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it,’” he says. “And, for all that’s in the ‘Workbooks’ book, there’s another set of notebooks, with the lines: ‘I love fashion, I love fashion, I love fashion!’”
Talking to Nigel about his current success in fashion photography makes him squirm. While he is happy to elaborate on his editorial work, he doesn’t bring up any campaigns, nor does he include images from those in ‘The Well’. His page on his agency DoBeDo’s website shows work for A.P.C. and John Lobb this year, but Nigel does not mention either to me. The closest he gets to that is when we talk about a recent trip to Japan, with him admitting he was there to do a shoot for a new brand. “What do they always say: ‘When you have the money, you want the cred and when you have the cred, you need the money,’” he says. Immediately before our first conversation, I had bumped into a designer acquaintance, a neighbour of Nigel’s in London Fields, who said she would love Nigel do her campaign. When I report this to Nigel, he all but recoils. “What?! Check me out! I am having a moment. But I don’t want any moments. When you’re in, you’re out, you know what I mean?”
Bomb damage
Belfast, 1992

Relatively early in Nigel’s book ‘The Well’, there are seven black-and-white images taken in Northern Ireland of men mending shop windows in the aftermath of an explosion. Nigel can’t explain why he was in Belfast in 1992 – “I was an energetic young kid, I just went!” – and the photographs had not been published before. “Linda was very keen on putting the whole set in, all of them,” says Nigel. “I really owe a lot to her. You know, photographers can be quite myopic, and egotistical, basing decisions on aesthetics. I have to credit Linda with knowing me more than I actually know myself, and I quite like that. I like to be stupid.”
“It was very accidental,” Linda tells me. “We tried to make the book in a single day, but we got nowhere near, although I did begin to understand his preferences. When he left Amsterdam, he left me with his whole hard drive, and there were lots of things on it that I discovered – things we hadn’t discussed. When I saw the Belfast images, I said, ‘Those images should go in!’ I didn’t invent the narrative of the book. It was there, but I saw it,” she says.
The “well” is a publishing term for the pages at the centre of a magazine. While shrugging off any great analysis of the book’s contents – “It’s not for me to say, Emily!” – Nigel does point out that there are a lot of shop windows in the book. “It was a big discovery,” says Linda. “It’s about presentation. If you are making a photo shoot for somebody like ‘Vogue’, it’s like a window, and I think the presentation in a shop window is the same as that in a photograph. Then there’s the reflection, the duality, the front and the back, the fact you can see it, but you can’t have it. When we landed on the notion of windows, that’s when Nigel allowed this book to exist.”
There’s a long history of windows in photography – think Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander – and they are also a trope in Nigel’s work beyond ‘The Well’. Among his photobooks is ‘Flowers for ___’ (2008), an oblique yet emotional document of the early years of Ruth and Nigel’s parenthood. In it there is a picture of their son Lev as a toddler (he’s now 20) in the arms of Ruth’s dad, with Ruth at his side and Ruth’s mum smiling from behind. It’s taken through a shop window and Nigel’s reflection is faintly visible against Lev’s dark coat. The image has echoes of Ruth’s ‘In bed with Mum and Dad’, and raises parallel questions, sweet yet unsettling, about the vulnerability of family life.
Fruit bowl collecting water
‘Dad’s Office’, December 1996 to November 1998
The precursor to Nigel’s friendship with Jamie Hawkesworth was fandom. Jamie had long admired Nigel before they finally met, sitting next to each other at a Christmas dinner at their former agency, M.A.P. Since then, Jamie has taken over his own management and Nigel has gone to the aforementioned DoBeDo, an agency founded by photographer Tyrone Lebon, of which Nigel says, “They’re very cool kids.” While they no longer share representation, Jamie and Nigel’s friendship has blossomed to the point where Nigel calls Jamie “my bastard son,” and in return, Jamie calls him his “demented dad.” “He’s such a weirdo!” says Jamie.
The first work of Nigel’s Jamie saw was the book ‘Dad’s Office’. Taken between 1996 and 1998, the photographs are a melancholy record of sorting and clearing furniture and detritus from Nigel’s dad’s north London premises. “In the original book, there are subsequent spreads with the same picture, but in a different light. That’s what really made me fall in love with his work,” says Jamie. “Then, there’s another print from the same series that is in another book (‘Edited photographs 1992–2004’), and it has a warm glow at the side. You can’t tell what the source of the warmth is. I asked him about it and he said it was just an error on the scan, but I love that – that a crappy scan can create something in your picture. It informed my own work in the dark room.”
Nigel is embarrassed about his own enthusiasm for traditional photographic history. He waves at the enviable collection of photography books on his shelves at home, saying, “I don’t want to be Mr. Boring, white, worthy, photography guy, but that’s that section over here!” and similarly he tells me a story of going to sit outside André Kertész’s wake in New York in 1985, but immediately qualifies the story with “Don’t write that!” His relationship with Jamie allows him to indulge this urge: Nigel lending Jamie his 10×8 camera, for example, or the pair competing as to who owns more significant editions of Eugène Atget’s books. “I really like when he shoots on film,” says Jamie. “I don’t like all that grey, digital stuff – I wind him up about that!” When I put this to Nigel, he says, “I use both, I am not bothered. But sometimes I think, ‘I am not fucking wasting my film on that!’”
Jane Spero
Westminster Bridge, 1982
The 1982 picture of his teenage friend Jane Spero poised on a postbox is the first image in ‘The Well’, and also features early on in ‘Workbooks’, on a diary page from 1989. Clearly, Nigel has returned to the picture repeatedly since it was taken. The caption tells us it’s 4.15am, yet Jane, who must have been about 16 at the time, is still wearing her Henrietta Barnett School uniform. This must have been around the time Nigel gave up on school. Had your mum already gone to the US by then?
“Yes, around then. She left London when I was 17 or 18, maybe later. I was kind of alone then. I don’t remember seeing my parents at all when I was Lev’s age. I would speak to them sometimes…”
My friend Merryl, a schoolfriend of Jane’s, remembers drunk snogging Nigel on a bench in Hampstead Heath in 1981, before he gave her a lift home on his moped, stopping to allow her to throw up. Keen to keep up his image as a boy who “didn’t see much action,” Nigel denies this, yet he does say of his early youth: “It was just amazing. There was no phone, there was no internet, we were just out and we had a fucking proper life. Not like a fucking internal life, like these days.” Are you on Instagram? “No, but I have, of course, nosied it.”

Functioning as an autobiography, ‘Workbooks’ renders this fusion of fun and glossed-over trauma – a mix that is so characteristic of 1980s young adulthood – very visible. There’s Nigel larking about in a photography studio in August 1984. “Yeah, that’s me in my New York Steven Meisel days. Wow! Embarrassing! I actually wanted only embarrassing pictures of me in the book,” he says. Then there’s the pencil drawing of the camera alongside the bleak report “no work, no money and no bicycle *things can only get better*,” a text that got him deported when it fell into the hands of a US immigration official.
“‘Workbooks’ was the idea of the people at Loose Joints, Lewis [Chaplin] and Sarah [Chaplin Espenon],” Linda says. “Once the fashion work was out, it seemed like the obvious thing to do.” Unlike the slightly loose ordering of ‘The Well’, the book is strictly chronological, yet it looks back on Nigel looking back. For example, a spread from 2012 shows a photograph of Ruth that must have been taken 20 years previous. The caption “a long time ago…” is written in twirly pencil script.
At over 500 pages, it was a monumental effort to edit, and Linda and Nigel talk about PDFs flying back and forth tens of times. “There was negotiation,” she says, “but we always had the luxury of having much more material than we needed.”
“My great line is: ‘A monkey can take a good photo, but they can’t edit.’ It’s true, right?” says Nigel.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary qualities of ‘Workbooks’ is that Nigel chose to photograph all his books himself, in natural light. “He shot them mostly in winter and on different days, so it was a lot of work for Lewis, colour correcting everything,” Linda says. Every now and then he makes the process visible by allowing his hands to stray into the frame. “When there was a choice between an image with a hand and an image without a hand, I always chose the image with a hand,” says Linda.
Air apparent
‘Vogue’, September 2019

This photo is one of the few on the walls of Nigel’s dark room. In that it shows a young woman larking around, it has a relationship with the picture of Jane Spero on the postbox from nearly 40 years earlier. Nigel actively works against the sexualisation of the models in his shoots. “If anything,” he says, “it’s nice if the woman, usually a young woman, is part of it. That she’s not objectified, and feels that she can contribute.” According to the stylist, Alex, “It’s not always easy to get models for him because he’s not concerned with making them beautiful.” Clearly, however, the Hadid girls are up for it, with Gigi bouncing around on this shoot in the 2019 ‘Vogue’ September issue, and Bella, in various forms of ungainly fancy dress including the aforementioned petrol pump, in ‘Vogue’, February 2020.
“There’s an early fashion shoot where I spent months working on a set of pictures about space people and aliens in suburbia,” says Nigel. Titled ‘Lost in Space’ and published in ‘The Face’ in 1989, these images are a clear precursor to the Hadid sessions, even though they were created in a very different context. “I was working with the stylist Melanie Ward and maybe we got eight pictures in a month,” says Nigel. “Then I must have shown them to ‘The Face’ magazine – we weren’t commissioned.” Latterly, in the profit-focused fashion world, most shoots have to happen within a single day.
Nigel may once have been extravagant with time, but he is now known for his economy. “Nigel is one of the few people who can do editorial and make money. Rather than calling in huge teams of stylists and make-up artists, he just uses a few hand-made props,” says his neighbour Huw.
“I like this one because it’s the first time I think there’s ever been dust in ‘Vogue’,” says Nigel, talking of another image in the ‘Air Apparent’ shoot, showing Gigi in the air holding a vacuum cleaner that is directed toward a small pile of dirt. “I got it from my own hoover and I brought it in a little Jiffy bag.”
“I think he kept that vacuum cleaner by the way,” says Alex. “He can build things into the shoot, like, he will say: ‘I want to photograph Gigi Hadid with a leaf blower,’ and then you find out he needed a leaf blower at home, or he will take 35 sandwiches home from a shoot in Paris and they will eat them for three days.” While Nigel is a notably generous person with both his time (Alex mentions the constant presence of mentees in his dark room) and his resources (everyone I spoke to mentioned something Nigel had given or lent them), he clearly detests the waste that characterises fashion.
Celine and Tara
Detroit, 1992
“This one. I’ve always felt very close to this particular image,” says Nigel, landing on the photograph of Celine and Tara in ‘The Well’. “It was during a job in Detroit, photographing some Detroit musicians, but I’d get up early in the morning and do other things,” he continues. “It gave me an opportunity to see these two women going to work at Burger King. And, to me, that’s more important than the actual work that I did there. I’ve always been very fond of that picture.” Looking at the picture with Nigel, what I find particularly touching is the way the women are posing. At one point in our conversation, he says to me: “There was a time when I was taking pictures in the ’80s and ’90s when I would be one of ten people taking pictures in London. Now there might be ten people in London who don’t have a camera.” Although they are in Detroit, not London, Tara and Celine’s attitude strikes me as coming from those earlier, less image-saturated days.

At Nigel’s book launch, I took pictures of the guests in order to remember the scene. When I show them to Nigel, he asks me what I am going to do with them and tells me off for having no plan other than to let them sit on my phone. “I worry about all these images lost in phones, or destroyed in hard drives,” he says. Among my pictures is one of filmmaker Morena Mfumu, Nigel’s former student and occasional collaborator. Looking at the picture with Nigel, I notice a hand on Morena’s shoulder that I hadn’t seen before. Forensic analysis undertaken by Lev, who has drifted into the kitchen where we are sitting, suggests that the hand is Nigel’s. Hands, Nigel’s or someone else’s, often appear at the edges of his pictures, not only in ‘Workbooks’, but throughout his work. Interjections from beyond the frame, perhaps they act as a reality check.
Mike
Piccadilly Circus, W1, ‘The People on the Street’, 2018

“This is going to make me sound like a twat,” says Nigel, “but I’m not really that interested in good photography.” How would you define what you do then? “Communication, as simple as that. Effective, or effecting.” Picking up his book ‘The People on the Street’, Nigel says, “This is probably the worst book I’ve ever done, but I also think it might be the best book I’ve ever done. I really hate it. I shouldn’t say that, because it sounds really awful. There’s no text. No explanation. Except, I think there is information in the pictures.” The book is a collection of images of Nigel taken by homeless people on London’s streets. The pictures are mostly out of focus and looking up at Nigel from below. Mike in Piccadilly photographed Nigel in the driving rain. The book was self-published and all the profits went to charity.
I saw a copy of Rachel Cusk’s new book ‘Parade’ at Nigel’s house. He hadn’t read it yet, but was intrigued by the reviews. Cusk is known for attempting to circumvent a central narrative voice in her fiction by drawing on accounts from apparently marginal characters. Perhaps inevitably, this makes her presence in her books very strong, even while it is unorthodox. Looking at ‘The People on the Street’, and thinking about Nigel’s general discomfort with authorial photography, the appeal of Cusk’s intrinsically doomed project is apparent.
Towards the end of my visit to his house, Nigel shows me a set of images of deliverymen in New York, taken a decade earlier. He is editing them to appear in an issue of a magazine guest-edited by stylist Camilla Nickerson. While I am drawn to their pleasing light and composition, he is looking at the pictures in terms of the information within them. He talks straightforwardly about what you can see in each photograph. “I think it’s all in front of you,” he says. “It’s just for you to see it. Everything is in front of you, but there are a lot of distractions along the way. And I don’t want to be judgmental, but occasionally I do want to point things out.”