Rankin is a mainstay of contemporary photography having shot nearly every artist of note and co-founded Dazed & Confused. Saga met the man behind the myth.

Rankin is a man whose name precedes him in a very real sense. From the prevalent rumors of rankin as womanizer to him being ‘the david bailey of the ‘90s’, Rankin has been cast in an array of different lights so disparate that it’s almost difficult to work out the man from the myth. That many of these myths have found their origin from Rankin himself makes it even more difficult to differentiate the truth from the embellishment.

Upon meeting him, however, one sees a man who’s very much in tune with the world around him and comfortable with what he does. And so he should be. Over the past two decades he’s captured innumerable images that resonate with the contemporary psyche. Odds are you know more images taken by rankin than you think you do.

Bar the humorous self-aggrandizing (most notably his campaign for an ’09 exhibition had the tagline ‘Fancy a Rank’), Rankin was in his youth a man trying to find his tone. Something he has had to come to terms with. “When I started I didn’t have the confidence to say ‘this is what I’m going to do’ because photography seemed too easy for me. Too obvious. I really wanted to communicate. I wanted to say something,” he says. “I wanted to turn people on, turn them off. Make them sick, make them cry, make them laugh. Just to make that emotional connection”.
 
That’s exactly what one gets from Rankin images. His ability to bring the character and individual to the fore while retaining humor - poking fun at fashion or the subject, but always laughing with them, not at them. “When I look back on my work from 20 years ago I see that I’ve been doing the same thing,” he confides. “There’s a thread to my work, and I think the thread can come down to two words - humor and honesty. They pervade my life. I guess I’m trying to pull out some humor, make the shots a bit funnier and take the mickey out of them a little bit.”

This can lead to problems however. The ease with which he takes the images and makes people open up is, by some, mistaken for something anyone can do. Yet like the ballet dancer or painter, simply because it may looks effortless doesn’t mean that it is. “What I do, I find really easy. Some people then think ‘well anyone can do it’. The difference for me between really interesting photographers and others is that really interesting photographers create something that you can’t quite put your finger on. There are loads of people who can do the alright photograph, but only a few can take the great one.” It is just this point he feels some of his detractors miss, with some misreading his work as that of a fashion photographer or simply disregarding what he does. somewhat modestly, Rankin doesn’t expect everyone to love his work, he simply expects credit to be given where he believes credit is due.

“I got into photographs really because I wanted to trigger something in people’s minds. Some people may think it’s shit, some people may think it’s challenging or exciting. All I want is some respect for trying really hard at it. Sometimes I go round my show and say to myself ‘fucking hell, you did that’! I’m a real lover of the discipline.”
 
And that he is. looking back on the wealth of powerful images he’s produced, not to mention the array of projects he continues to create, one can also be sure that he’ll remain an integral part of the canon of photography for some time to come.