showstudio:

White Ball, Amanda Cazalet for Martine Sitbon, 1990

Using hand cut paper masks whilst printing the pictures allowed me to take someones skin tone from white to black or vice versa whilst keeping their clothes light. For ages in fashion we have accepted that peoples skin tones could be printed bleached out and totally white (look at Erwin Blumenfeld’s beautiful shot of the eye and the lip for the front of Vogue or Paolo Roversi’s ethereal nudes.) I merely reversed that, as I felt that the pure blackness of the skin tone was just as beautiful as its whiteness. The subject I photographed could be of any skin type. It has nothing to do with race anymore than putting a blue gel and a red gel over the lights. Look at painters like Kees Van Dongen, Matisse, or Otto Dix and their use of colour to depict the emotion and beauty of a woman’s face.
Photography is widely misunderstood. It is not a medium that shows you truth any more than a feature film is. We all suspend belief when we are watching a film, superman cannot really fly, so why when it comes to looking at a single frame we completely change how we read the intention behind the image.  Photography is a highly subjective proposition of what the photographer wants to communicate and in fact the more skilled the photographer, the more they will show you a vision that you cannot possibly see or even imagine. That is what we want from our artists, to show us worlds we cannot see.  This is true of all photography, from war photography to fashion photography. Photography is not about reality any more than any of the other arts; cinema, painting or writing. I would argue that it should not be shackled to this notion of being the bringer of truth, that has never been it’s role. – Nick Knight