Katie Simpson, fashion photography archivist

As the Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum comes to a close after drawing over 582,000 visitors (ranking the exhibition among the top 20 the museum has ever staged) has definitely proven: fashion has an increasing currency and relevance in the art world. Uniquely poised to benefit from this convergence is fashion photography archivist, Katie Simpson. A graduate in fine art photography from the Glasgow School of Art (who later went on to do a postgrad in Conservation at Camberwell), Simpson started working on the archive of famed photographer Nick Knight in 2008. Says the heavily pregnant Simpson, “It was an amazing project to work on because his work is so diverse. I was seeing Nick work intensively with his retouchers and seeing what could be achieved with that. First hand I got to experience Nick’s work – his Paint Explosions and Susie Smoking are incredible.” In addition to setting up Knight’s archive, Simpson also helped produce his monograph and several of his exhibitions. Spotting a gap in the market for her unique skills, Simpson set up K.S. Archivist in 2009, almost immediately landing her next client, David Sims. She shrugs, “It was all through word of mouth really. From there people mentioned what I was doing was quite unusual. They hadn’t had anyone come in and give a good sorting out to the archive. It was at a particular stage in photographers’ careers where they start to produce books and do art print sales so it’s a worthwhile project.”

Together with her clientele (which has swelled to include the highly respected likes of Mert & Marcus, Stephane Sednaoui and Sølve Sundsbø) Simpson and her small team of three work intensely for a period often over a year, planning and implementing a digital collection, as well as housing prints and negatives. She demurs, “To be honest what I do isn’t glamorous – I scan and archive – but I have an understanding of how a fashion photography office works. I get to see my clients’ work from the beginning to what they are producing now. Which not many people do. So getting to sit and look through their archive is really an amazing privilege.”

While Simpson works with the latest state-of-the-art equipment, she remains a traditionalist at heart. “I’d have loved to gotten my hands on the archives of Cecil Beaton or Guy Bourdin. Even though I love the digital side of things, hands on, looking through a whole reel of film – that’s always going to be incredible. That was a period of time that was just magical – a real dream of how things were. But I think that now it’s just as interesting – technology just provides a different way of producing exciting work.” While her work is often painstaking and laborious, archiving can still yield some glorious revelations for both Simpson and her clients. “For me, nothing beats going in on the first day after the initial consultation and opening the first box and knowing the work ahead of me.” She continues excitedly,  “The best thing is opening up that first box that may be has been closed for more than 10 years and seeing the excitement in the photographer’s face. I just love seeing them get as excited as I am.”

See more of Insiders here and Menswear Insiders here.