NICOLE NODLAND
- Leigh Maynard
- May 4
- 13 min read
Not everyone can say that they have had a midnight call to come down to Paisley Park, but internationally acclaimed photographer Nicole Nodland can claim to have received one. The how and the why will be revealed subsequently. We first met at a fashion event a few years ago, and the next time we crossed paths, she was clicking away on camera in a London set with another icon, David Bowie’s vibrant tones filling the air. We could have chatted for hours, but, as they (sort of) say, the shoot must go on. Conversation flowed as easily in our subsequent encounter, across a screen from London to Minnesota, as if chatting with a lifelong friend. It struck me in that moment that this is part of Nicole’s incredible talent: to render all subjects at ease with her affable air, at once disarming and utterly charming, a sensibility that I can imagine underpins her incredible success.
Words by Leigh Maynard
Noted as one of the most influential photographers working in music, fashion, and editorial today, Nicole has shaped the modern cultural landscape through her collaborations with major artists and publications such as Vogue, Elle, Numéro, Nylon, and Rolling Stone. And perhaps most notably, (and back to the aforementioned point) her work as Prince’s former personal photographer. Nicole’s portfolio is filled not only with striking images of ‘his purpleness’, but also with a roster of internationally acclaimed talent including Lana Del Ray, Jacob Collier, Dua Lipa, Sinéad O’Connor, Sam Smith, Florence + The Machine and Paul Weller, each one’s essence so expertly captured, evidently shaped by Nicole’s ability to foster a relaxed atmosphere.
Nicole takes me back to the beginning of her journey, explaining that, in photography, a fundamental aspect of nature was her initial driving force. “I've always been so enamoured with the sky, that's always been a thing for me. Just appreciating the clouds and the way light hits things. I've always been this kid who was a ballet dancer, but I was obsessed with beautiful or interesting things. My visual world opened when I got a camera; it was a big catalyst for me. Then you really start to see things with a conscious eye. I'd go out into the woods and spend hours up there just looking around. I had a microscope and would take notes. Even now, I appreciate the sky. It's like there's a whole free, cinematic, glorious world up there that shocks me, astonishes me, and almost makes me overly emotional to no end sometimes.”
Nicole turns her screen so I can appreciate that crisp Minnesota sky. She’s right, it is beautiful, “a definite antidote to London’s incessant grey,” we laugh in agreement. Today, she darts between the two and anywhere else where the work takes her. But Nicole wasn’t always so fond of her American home. As a child, she lived in the city, and at the age of eight, the family relocated. “I was so devastated. I was like, ‘oh no, we're moving to the suburbs.’ Now I appreciate it. Now I'm like, ‘oh, this is great out here’.” As for that camera, that catalyst was a gift from Nicole’s dad, perhaps to ease the relocation; nevertheless, one that would ignite an appreciation for her immediate world, before setting her photographic story in motion.“I would do hair and makeup for my friends. Then I started using that to take their before-and-after pictures, and then a whole photo shoot. I'd have them running around in the woods and dress them up. It was a huge thing, and I loved it. Then people started coming to me, asking me to do their hair and makeup and take their photos. It was mainly my mother's friends, anybody who would be a willing subject, my favourite was my friend Melissa.”
From there, Nicole started assisting some photographers in New York. “It helped immensely because you get to see how they work on set. I learned a lot. I was in school. I took some photography classes at university, where I learned the history of photography and about famous photographers, and that was incredibly important. And I also learned on a 10-by-8 camera. I spent time in the darkroom and learned about lighting, which boosted my confidence. It's not just about taking a picture, it's about building this whole world on set, developing it in the moment, wrangling people, working with them, and building trust in no time at all, just getting that vibe and energy going.”
Looking through Nicole’s incredible portfolio, in hindsight, it’s easy to see the trajectory of her career, still in an industry beset with challenges, foremost among them fierce competition, one question burns: how did Nicole land that most prestigious of roles with Prince at the tender age of 22? “I was living in Los Angeles doing hair and makeup to help supplement my life, shooting models just to get a portfolio together. One model I'd shot, worked for RCA Records, and he had said something candidly, just as a joke, because I told him I was going home to Minnesota, and he said, ‘Oh, make sure you call Prince!’ I was always a huge Prince fan from a young age. There was something more to him than just the physicality. I thought he was extremely sexy, interesting, exotic, and mysterious. And being from Minnesota, I was in this small world. I just loved his world of freedom to do what he wanted. So, I called up [Paisley Park], and I said, I'm a photographer. I'm here for a couple of weeks. And so that night, I got a call, it was really late, and my mother answered the phone. I was in my pyjamas. So, they said, ‘he wants you to come down tonight.’ I got all dressed up, wore my purple socks, drove back out to Paisley Park, and that was history. And so, I became the first in-house personal photographer he'd ever had. He's the first person who believed in me, trusted me, and gave me this incredible gift; it was just so beautiful. I was so nervous, but when we worked together, it was just seamless. It felt so natural. For all those years, he just trusted me. He just let me get on with it and do my thing, and it was beautiful. He really was my angel, and he helped me with trusting in my own abilities and helped me get through some challenging times.”
Nicole worked with Prince for two years, then periodically thereafter. Her final project with him, almost 10 years later, sadly did not come to fruition when, mid-project, he tragically passed away. “That was heartbreaking because I also thought that, if he asked me to come back, I would jump at the chance. I thought about how we might work together differently, and it would have given me another chance to try to get the iconic photo with him, either in an intimate moment or simply because I’d be more comfortable. But I never got that chance”, Nicole reflects. Still, there must be a favourite from the existing collection, I enquire. She says she cannot choose. Though one she vividly recalls reflects her photographic sensibilities and her quiet talent for disarming her subjects. “There are so many, they're in the vaults. The ones that are just of him, simply wearing a gown. He was sitting on the balcony of his hotel room, overlooking Central Park. I didn't have any lighting; it’s just a simple shot of him. But it’s a favourite because it was just really quick and it was just very intimate.”
That picture speaks not only to the depth of Nicole’s talent but also to the creative magic that occurs when artist and subject shed inhibition and trust in the moment. And it was in those moments that Nicole built her confidence, became more experimental, and demonstrated a quiet symbiosis between innovation and timeless restraint. “I’m a bit of a classicist. And I always tried to strip it back a bit in terms of his style and my style. And so, it was just more about him as opposed to all the whistles and bells. It was challenging at times, but he basically just left me to my own devices. He'd say, ‘We're going to do a music video’, and I had to learn how to direct music, and he'd say, ‘The song is this.’ That's all I knew. I did not give myself an easy time. I'd say, do you want an elephant thing, or an Egyptian thing with a cougar? Or do you want this, and he'd circle one, and I'd be like, holy sh*t, what have I just done? But I did get the elephant. I did a shoot with the cougar; it was like my playground. I could do whatever I could imagine. It was amazing.”
Nicole’s willingness to go that extra mile, accompanied by her striking visual vocabulary, would leave an indelible mark on another artist, this time in the infancy of her career. The journey to a defining aesthetic for Lana Del Rey felt inherently natural to Nicole. This vision helped to shape the young musician’s visual identity on her early albums. “She was such a dream to shoot because it was just natural. I met her largely through Johnny Blue Eyes, a stylist, performer, and artist. The three of us met in his garden, and Lana turned up, and was so sweet and a little bit of a blank canvas. He and I started asking her what she liked and what inspired her, and through her answers, everything became clear. Marilyn Monroe, Priscilla Presley, Elvis and Jesus. And it's so funny because Johnny and I hadn't worked together before then, but we'd both separately been doing a lot of the same things, like working with flower crowns and roses. So, our world was serendipitous. I love that kind of Catholic iconography and Americana, and it was nice to look at it from an objective point of view, a little while after living in London and just throwing all these elements into a bag, shaking it up, and having that bag explode. It came to me very easily. It wasn't too contrived, and it was something that was just kind of an inherent, visceral thing that naturally happened. And it was just a dream. It was like I could finally do that. And I had a person to do that with.”
Nicole has an adaptive approach as she develops each shoot, yet with her depth of knowledge and experience, she continues to test herself, to strive for greater things. And that drive, that inability to settle, as with so many creatives, is often what separates the good from the great. “For a musician like Lana, we collaborated and did it together. That's the dream: when you ask questions, and you have some time. I had done a shoot with her previously to Born to Die, and that freedom developed a bit more. But I guess for musicians or artists that are fully developed at that point, if it's for a record label, then you have all the cooks in the kitchen, so you kind of, you put your two cents in, and sometimes they just let you do your thing. And for a fashion editorial like the shoot we did with Imogen [Poots], we had little time. Still, the theme was cinema. Tasha knew she wanted to do black and white, and it kind of came to me to do a kind of surrealism, amalgamated with a silent film. We didn't have time to talk to anybody about it, but thankfully, it all came together and worked seamlessly. The shoot was fast and furious. Imagine we did 14 shots in 2.5 hours. I felt like we were just really getting into a groove, and I just kept wanting to shoot, but then it was over, you're always trying to get something more, just a perfect image. I'm still learning. I'm still going. ‘Okay. I still need to push harder.’”
Looking through Nicole’s back catalogue, there is that sense of ease almost emanating from her subjects, as if just the other side of that moment, they were chatting like friends again, relaxed, familiar, natural. I’m intrigued to hear how Nicole sees her style, and the answer lies in subtle nuances. “I like developing a story to have an actual person, and you're capturing that essence of them. But not just a blank model; there's some emotion, some feeling. I have some underlying style, and I don't know what that is. I don't think I have the objectivity someone else might have if they looked at an overview of my images. But I think there's a subtlety there. I always try to go for it; it always ends up as a kind of refinement, and I always try to make pictures that can hold up in 20 years. Not just out of the moment. Just being authentic is a kind of refinement, maybe an underlying subversiveness. Not an overt in-your-face trying to be outrageously provocative, but for me it's more provocative to have a subtlety of some sort.”
As she reflects on her past work, over time and through life experience, each image continues to evolve for Nicole. Still, some of the older ones offer her a moment to reminisce and recall the different creative landscapes and situations and their power to shape freer forms of expression. It’s a moment of reflection that ignites a desire to evolve further, where the past informs the present. “I started pulling out all these old pictures from earlier; I've been shooting forever. I've shot every kind of story—the pictures from when I didn't know as much. It wasn't commercial. I was living in Arizona, and I would go out with my friend Leanne, who was a goth girl. She had long, red hair, and she was very pale, and she had these, these bee-stung lips. She was beautiful, with long nails. Luckily for me, she was into vintage, so she had tons and tons of it, everything from the Victorian times to the 1970s. I came across all of these pictures of her—double exposures, ghosts, a witch in the cemetery. And I had her levitating, and the pictures are freer. They feel fresher, and I think, and so unique, not perfect and more experimental. So, I guess those, I would say I'm looking at those with new eyes, going, I wanna be that girl again. I think I need to do it—capturing real people in their environments or on the street. I love street style photography. I love Charles Traub, Gary Winogrand, and Joe Meyerowitz. I had this magazine for a while and I got to work with some amazing people from Magnum, including Bruce Gilden. And I got to work with Charles Traub and, sadly, almost with Martin Parr, who just passed; he was going to do the next issue. But I also love Richard Avedon, Steven Klein, and Steven Meisel. I was obsessed with Steven Meisel. Let's be honest. I was always thinking, ‘What would Steven do?’ His work with Italian Vogue over the course of those years with Franca Sozzani, I was so inspired by that.”
Contemplating one story that Nicole feels she’s yet to photograph, it is our roots and the place we originated that can sometimes reveal our authentic creative selves and ignite our deepest, most meaningful forms of creativity. “I guess there are so many things that I'd like to do. Right now, I'm getting into it with my family. A story about families and parents: I have step-parents, and it’s about growing up with these two sets. It is nice to reconnect, even though there have been unfortunate times of health issues. It's a privilege. It's a rite of passage. So, I've had the chance to return to my childhood home and see things in a different light. I really feel the need to keep going with this documentary film I'm making and the pictures.”
As a medium, Nicole says she’s really enjoying film more. “I think after having been a photographer for 30 years, they say it's the natural progression, but it is a very different discipline. I love the challenge, and I think it gives you a way to say things you can't in photos or imagery. It gives you more time to tell the story.”
As for Nicole’s career highlights, she hardly pauses to answer, and it’s perhaps easy to predict what she’s going to say, “I guess, whether or not it was the best work, but for me, the answer is Prince. There's a lot of sentimentality there, but obviously just the appreciation and the gratitude for what he has given me. What he did single-handedly was to choose me despite everybody and save me from homelessness. And just to be able to have that experience working with him, and at times it was like the army bootcamp drill training. But after that, you can do anything. I learned how to direct videos. It was like throwing yourself into the fire. You just had to do it. And the experience of being on the road and on tour with the band and stuff. I guess it would be Prince too, but there are so many. Another one that comes to mind is with Jane O'Connor, in her later years. That's so memorable because she was so fragile, and it felt so intimate. She opened up through this exchange of stories and through our honesty with each other. I could see from the beginning that she was very shaky and closed, and then just towards the end, at the shoot, it was so beautiful. Those moments are the best, you know? You have to earn the subject’s trust, and you have to be vulnerable with each other.”
One always imagines it is the subject, exposed by the lens, who gives so much during a shoot, yet Nicole challenges this perception. To capture these fleeting moments of authenticity, she too must open herself up, surrendering to every session. It’s a striking revelation: on set, she appears commanding, in her element, yet it is that delicate balance she strikes between professionalism and vulnerability that elevates every image. That’s not to say she doesn’t have fun too; Nicole can definitely draw out the playfulness in her subjects. “I'm so nervous. I get nervous before every shoot. And then even up until you get going, you're like, ‘okay, fine.’ Then you're in your element, so that's when the fun is. People generally are surprised. I have these meetings, and they're like, ‘you're so softly spoken’. I don't know if they think I can do the job, and then they see me on the shoot, and they're like, holy sh*t. I don’t know what happens, but I feel like I'm in my element. When everybody's working together, it's such a wonderful thing. You're all trusting each other. I feel like I'm impervious to cold, pain, hunger or fear. I just love it.”
As our interview draws to a close, I am keen to see what the future holds and which upcoming projects Nicole is working on. “I have a few secret projects. But I can't talk about them; we'll see if they even come to fruition,” she says. “But I have started working on a film. There are so many elements and moving parts in film, but I'll give it a go! And I feel it is a natural progression in a way because I am a sort of director on the set, and I do music videos. So, I feel comfortable. And I like the idea of doing my family documentary. I’m going back to my history. As for the rest, I'll keep it a secret for now. But one final thought, my dream would be to shoot Erykah Badu. I'll put that up there. She's incredible.”
As we say goodbye, contemplating Nicole’s extraordinary story, her remarkable energy, her fun, friendly air and calming influence, it's obvious what Prince saw in that very first instance, and I’m inclined to think, should Nicole’s wish come true, Erykah might just feel the same way, too.
This interview is inside The MUSIC Issue 16. Purchase your copy here.
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