Rankin

“So,” says Rankin to a Clarence Hotel bar-room containing twenty-odd beautiful young women in male drag, and Elvis Costello. Hands on hips. Stepping back from a camera. Surveying a roomful of arched eyebrows, angular black gabardine, and Brylcreemed girlish heads, frozen in poses; and in the centre, one large, quiet, big-hatted, very comprehensively spectacled, fairly arresting-looking pop star these girls are too young to have heard of. “Who here fancies Brad Pitt?”

The girls drop their poise slightly, relax, glance shyly down or around at each other, smilingly debating Brad Pitt’s various merits. The consensus is bashful, but positive. “Mmm, okay. What about George Clooney?” Some murmurings to the effect that he’s “a bit old”. “Thom Yorke?” Twenty perfect noses are wrinkled in unhidden repugnance. Elvis grins, watching this.

“Nobody fancies him? …Right, okay. Let’s have a look.” Rankin consults a fresh Polaroid from an assistant - a test shot of the pose they’ve just attempted, a multiple pastiche of Costello’s This Year’s Model album cover – and, before passing it round to the girls, shows it to Elvis, who gazes thoughtfully at it for a moment, and then explodes into laughter. “That is great,” he breathes, gazing silently at it again when he finally stops. Then he starts laughing again until he wipes his eyes. “Ahhh,” he sighs, shaking his head, smiling, as the girls giggle around him. “That is just great.”

Book and magazine publisher, TV and film production company owner, and most famously, photographer, Rankin Waddell, 35, Scottish by birth and Londoner in life, is arguably the most well-known fashion, music and pop-culture snapper in the credible pop world. More alternative these days than Annie Leibovitz and certainly more fashionably British, Rankin is also the art director and co-founder, with business partner and editor Jefferson Hack, of Dazed And Confused magazine - arguably The Face’s only British rival, if more of an alternative, questing read, less obsessed with constantly taking the pulse of the zeitgeist. His fashion spreads are lush, surprising, off-kilter, and occasionally contentious: shoots using disabled models, stories built around the visual idea of a dead body. He has also published, via his own book imprint Vision On, a number of themed collections as well as books by other photographers, ranging from personal documentaries to an Audrey Hepburn collection.

But lately, since his landmark shoot with Madonna for her album Ray Of Light, he’s best known for his celebrity portraits. From Blur to Kate Moss to U2 – and as of last year, the Queen of England – no-one who is anyone, it seems, has not commissioned him. He is known almost universally among his subjects for being “a great laugh” to work with, and, in person, is certainly candid, mischievous, and very funny: he has that gift of making you feel at ease, without letting you know – crucially, because this would ruin the effect – that he’s going out of his way to do so. (“Photo shoots are usually not this much fun,” Elvis himself will tell me later. “Definitely not.”)

Curiously, Rankin is given a tepid-to-negative reception in the media: a Channel 4 documentary delighted in catching him out in an angry moment; his expensive car, A-list phonebook and business-partner’s model girlfriend (Kate Moss) are cattily mentioned in the press. Maybe this is because he makes no secret of his fascination with women, one that most men share but never make plain. Maybe it’s an assumption that his success is chiefly based on nabbing that Madonna commission, that that alone opened all the other doors. Or maybe it’s that old, sad, typical thing, where someone is envied for the cardinal sin of being widely, variously, unfathomably successful, while (even worse) making that success look effortless, and fun.

The commission that has Rankin most recently in the public eye, and which has taken him out of the realm of the alterna-fashion cognoscenti and introduced him to everyone else, is of the Queen. It’s to celebrate her golden jubilee.

RANKIN WADDELL: I’m not supposed to talk about it until the sixth of February.

KIM PORCELLI: Is that when it’s released?

RW: Yeah, sixth of Feb. So I don’t know how… we can get round it.

KP: We’re not going to publish until after the sixth.

RW: Oh, OK. Cool. Please don’t. ’Cos I’ll get really told off. Like, properly told off.

KP: By the Queen, which is not a joke.

RW: Well, I’m already in her bad books.

KP: Why?

RW: Nothing. Forget it (presses lips shut).

KP: What was your first reaction when you heard she wanted you? You must have been pretty surprised.

RW: I was excited! It’s exciting. Really surprised, really excited. You know, I admire the Queen. I admire her, as a woman.

KP: Oh? In what way?

RW:I just think she’s an incredible woman.

KP: In what way though?

RW: Em… I just think anyone that… has had to do something like what she has to do… It’s not choice. She had the choice made for her. And although you might think it might be a particularly enviable position, really, to have to have a duty, and to deal with it, and to be… quite powerful a person, and quite determined… I admire that.

KP: Do you think she’s good at her job?

RW: (immediately) Oh, I’m not sure. I wouldn’t be able to comment on it, on her job. I don’t… you know, I’m from Scotland…

KP: What do you reckon her job is?

RW: Oh, I don’t know… I kind of know a lot about what she does, and what her position is, but you can’t really bring politics into shooting the Royal Family. I’m a photographer, I document things. That’s my job. So I made a decision about how I was going to photograph her, and that was it.

KP: What was the thought process like? You must have brainstormed in advance like mad.

RW: I had lots of ideas about what we could do. I had about three weeks to prepare. And I went through all the Cecil Beaton shots, to see. The other thing I did was, I kind of learned quite a lot about her, and about the Royal Family, I researched the whole thing. It was good. It was really interesting. (thinks) It’s difficult, isn’t it? I mean, I only met the Queen for five minutes! But I’ve taken three photographs of her that I really like. And obviously it’s a royal portrait, it’s an official photograph, so they’ve got approval of the shots. So whatever they decide, I have to kind of go with.

KP: What do you think you achieved with them? Did you do well?

RW: Em – I got her to be… (searches for word)… really fresh. You have to see the shots, really. The shots are great. They’re kinda… very… (pause)… Well obviously, she’s 74, isn’t she? So it’s a difficult, em… (slightly uncomfortable) Well, she’s gonna be 74… But I think I got something that kinda shows how exciting someone like that can be.

KP: What did you think of the Lucien Freud painting? [Another of the special jubilee commissions, a harshly honest portrait of an elderly woman]

RW: I thought it was really clever. It didn’t hide any of her age, and I thought that was really, really brilliant. Whereas my work would be more about making her look younger, because I’m more… I try to make people look incredible. I try to make people look glamorous, and incredible and beautiful. So my tricks are to hide age.

KP: So you tend to try for glamorous and incredible and beautiful, rather than…

RW: Well, I think you can do that, and also be real, have a reality in there as well. Because you’re supposed to be documenting. I think it’s possible to stray too far from reality. You lose the essence of the person. I retouched Debbie Harry, when I shot her, so she looked 20 years younger, and I could have done that with the Queen’s photo. But I didn’t, because that’s not really what I’m being asked to do.

KP: What was she like? Did she speak to you, call you by your name?

RW: Oh, yeah. Looked me in the eye. Very strong handshake. She laughed at me, actually. My lead fell out of my camera, and she thought it was very funny. She was cool.

KP: Were you very nervous?

RW: I wasn’t, and then she walked in the room, and then I was nervous for about two minutes, and then I wasn’t nervous again.

KP: Are you typically nervous?

RW: (immediately) Never.

KP: Never? (Rankin shakes head very definitely) When was the last time you can remember being nervous?

RW: Well, I think you have to be a little bit on edge before you shoot someone, or you don’t get very good shots. But, no… (thinks)

KP: There’s on edge, and then there’s nervous.

RW: (still thinking) She’s got an incredible power, the Queen. It’s really weird. She’s got a kind of aura about her. I can’t remember the last time I was nervous. Madonna, maybe. Madonna I was nervous of. When I first met her. But after I first met her, I was fine.

KP: I’d say at her level of success, she probably tried to make you feel at ease.

RW: (Disbelieving) Who, Madonna?

KP: Yeah.

RW: (ominously) No.

KP: What, did she test you?

RW: Yeah. The first thing she said to me was, (looks me straight in the eye) “I hate these things. Shoots. The reason I chose you, was because you make people look like they’re having fun.” It was scary, that. But from there on in she just made me laugh. She’s got a great sense of humour.

KP: What do you have to bring, or prepare, for these shoots? Did Madonna dictate the whole thing?

RW: She didn’t dictate very much at all. Hair and make-up, styling, were hers, completely. But the reality was that she was quite... quite open. I think most people like that are really comfortable, in the sense that they can look at themselves in the mirror, they can tell whether they like their hair and make-up, they can tell from the Polaroid if they like it, and they’re quite open. I mean, the hairdresser was trying to tell me how to light it, and I was like (smirk) “Yeah, right”. But I was just very polite about it.

KP: Did she metamorphose once the camera was pointed at her, or was she on the whole time?

RW: No. She was on the whole time. That’s just her. And I’ve seen her at parties. I was at a party with all her dancers once, and she was dancing, with all her dancers…

KP: Was she good?

RW: Fucking amazing dancer. Everyone there was just like, (mesmerised) Wow. Couldn’t believe it. It was quite amazing. He’s a lucky bloke, Guy Ritchie.

I forget how this happens, but we are talking about psychoanalysis.

RW: …I kind of don’t… really have a lot of belief in my subconscious. I don’t think I’ve got a very – I mean, I’ve a quite dark personality, but I don’t think there are parts of my brain that I hide away from other parts of my brain.

KP: That’s precisely the impression I’ve got watching you today.

RW: Oh, that’s nice.

KP: Well, I don’t know if it’s positive or negative, but…

RW: If it’s in my head, I say it.

KP: And if it’s in your head, you do it, as well. I’m thinking of the book imprint, and all the projects, and all the other magazines – What do you get out of, say, [newish fashion title] Another Magazine that you can’t do in Dazed?

RW: I mean, it’s difficult for me to answer that. Because I’m only the publisher of Another Magazine – I’m not as creatively involved as I am in Dazed. I matched Jefferson [Hack, Dazed founding editor] and the art director and I said, “You two should work together” - but I don’t do the day-to-day.

KP: But why did you start it?

RW: Another was intended for us, because we were getting too old to do Dazed And Confused. If I’m really honest about it.

KP:Too old!

RW: Yeah. I think that both of us felt that we needed to do something that was for us, again. Commercially, we only ever do things that really, really touch us. Things that we just have to do. Like, we’re doing a car magazine, as well. And it’s just such a good idea to do a car magazine that I couldn’t resist doing it. Whereas with Another, we were both kind of like, “We need to do something more grown-up. We’re grown-ups, now. We’re both in steady relationships, we’re getting to that point where we’re talking about mortgages and marriage”.

So Another is basically the essence of Dazed but really, really solidified down into two issues a year. So all the things that can go wrong on a monthly magazine, you can iron out with a biannual. You’re almost creating a perfect magazine. And if you read it, you’ll be like, incredibly surprised. Jeff’s just a genius, he’s a genius editor. He’s one of the best editors that I could ever work for.

KP: Why is he good?

RW: Because he’s direct, he’s honest. He’s a magpie, he can steal things from different areas. He’s never scared to say what he thinks. He’s considered, in the way that he thinks and talks about things. He’s passionate. He’s loads of things. He’s been the perfect editor for me, as well, because he doesn’t really do something for any other reason apart from that he thinks it will go towards making an incredible magazine. Whereas I’ll do stuff for other magazines that’s much more commercial. I’ll sell my soul, a lot quicker than he will.

KP: Did you ever have a problem with doing that?

RW: No… I used to. I used to have a bit of a problem with it. Now, I kind of don’t, as much as I used to. And I can say no to things now. But anyway, financially, we’ve always needed me to do that. Because it’s almost like a marriage, myself and Jeff. ’Cos I’ve always had to support Dazed. And now I don’t. It’s an incredibly successful magazine, it’s making a lot of money now.

KP: Is that mostly advertising revenue, or sales?

RW: Both. It’s doing really well. I think the only thing Jeff can criticise about me, is that we can be very insular about the people that we have as our friends. We’ve always seen ourselves as kind of more than just magazine publishers, or photographers and writers. We’ve always seen ourselves as very much on a level with other creative people. So if you’re an actress, a musician, an artist, we’ve always treated them like they’re us. And that was one of our ideologies, with Dazed initially, is: there’s no mediation. It’s direct. It’s about asking the kind of questions that if these people are your friends, you’d want to ask. As opposed to the kind of questions that they’d want to answer. Do you see what I mean? So, because we’re like that, I guess we kind of don’t, like, hunt and fight for stories. Someone wrote an article about Jefferson, once, and they said that if he wanted Madonna, he’d call her up directly, through his friends.

KP: I read that article, yeah.

RW: But he wouldn’t. That’s what makes me laugh.

KP: Would he not?

RW: No. Because he wouldn’t want Madonna. That’s the kind of person Jefferson is. He wants someone when they’re not interesting to everyone else. And that’s what I like about him. Whereas I would want Madonna. I want Madonna, on the cover! But that’s not what Jefferson would do. And I like that.

That’s the great thing about us. We’re totally – we’re like yin and yang, it’s really weird. We’re really different, but our core has the same kind of sensibility. I mean, I think if he was a girl, he’d be my girlfriend. (Actually gives this concept serious thought) …No, but in a sense, he wouldn’t be, because we’re almost too… kind of different. Just that bit too different.

Three years ago, Rankin published Raw Nudes, a book of female nudes, then followed it with Male Nudes a year later.

KP: I bet you learned loads about women and loads about men when you did those books.

RW: God, yeah. Loads.

KP: Like what?

RW: Well, I was kind of a bit uncomfortable about doing nudes with women.

KP: Why?

RW: I don’t know. The woman I was with at the time made me quite nervous of them. [Talks at length about this, eventually completely absolving the ex of blame] I was just nervous. I don’t know.

KP: What occurred to me when I looked at the two sets of pictures, was: the photographs of the women were imaginative, and bizarre, and funny, and fantastical, and the men’s pics were in comparison totally basic, more like, “Wahey! I’m naked!”.

RW: (laughs) That’s really funny. Well, the idea for the books was that the women and men come up with their own ideas, as to how they want to be shot. I call it collaborative photography. You let them see the work, and largely direct it. You give over the power. That’s why that documentary [made by Channel 4 about Dazed And Confused, wherein Rankin was not depicted kindly] was so annoying, because they were dispelling that idea about me, about collaboration, and it’s what I live by, it’s what I’ve gained a reputation by doing.

But anyway, initially, when I put the advert in, I said I wanted men and women. But I was so obviously more interested in the women, that it was just... (rolls eyes in a manner that denotes “pathetic”) ’Cos I’m attracted to women. And I like women, more than men. I don’t hang out with loads of men, I’m not a big blokey bloke. I like women, right? So they all came in, and I liked the women’s ideas more, as well. And I just thought actually, I’ll do the women first, and eh I’ll do the men later. And the women... (pause) …the women made me nervous, made me interested, made me fascinated. And it was really strange.

But what I realised immediately was that I was really shy to take nudes. I had done them before, but I had never done like… a big load of them. And I realised that them taking their clothes off created a real… immediate sexual energy, between you and them. Whether they were gorgeous, old, whatever. It didn’t matter. You were immediately… I ended up (lowers voice sheepishly) …having relationships with… quite a couple of the girls… I’m not saying that in a kind of… It was a bit of a weird…

KP: Isn’t a book of naked women going to sell no matter what you do?

RW: No, it’s not. If I hadn’t had Kate Moss on the cover, it would have sold less. And it was a career building thing, as well as an exercise and an artistic idea. And I kind of felt really guilty, sometimes, when I was helping give the women ideas, ’cos the book is based on it being totally their ideas. But what it came down to, is that they loved it, they loved having that kind of control.

KP: My guess is that the way that women carry themselves when they’re not wearing any clothes is really different from the way that men carry themselves in the same state.

RW: Yeah. That, and women didn’t want to be objectified, in those photos. They were doing it for themselves. Whereas the men were doing it for themselves, but also so that people could see it. You’d expect it to be the other way around.

KP: Would you? I wouldn’t.

RW: Well, if you look at nude photography, how it’s grown as an art form and a genre of photography, you’d think that women would have this attitude about their appearance. But actually the women weren’t really interested in doing it for men. Even the models. They were like, “I like the idea of collaborating”, they all chose their own shots, it was really good, really powerful. Whereas with the men – I kind of didn’t want to do the men. With all the women I felt really shy, but with the men I was so kind of… This is where it gets a bit complicated, ’cos I realised quite a lot about men. Because I felt nervous with the women, I thought I’d be really nervous with the men. But the blokes would take their clothes off, and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t fancy them, do I?” Not nervous at all. Didn’t care. I was passionate about the images, but…

KP: I read somewhere where you said you don’t like the male nude.

RW: No, that’s not what I said at all.

KP: That’s actually a quote that was attributed to you, verbatim.

RW: What I’d say about it, and what I learned about it, is that men’s bodies are really actually quite beautiful, especially in the genital area, it’s really quite a beautiful thing. And the reason you don’t think of it as being beautiful, is because you don’t see it, in images. No-one aestheticises it at all.

KP: So there’s no history of the image of it, really, is there.

RW: There’s no aesthetic. And that was my whole thing, about making it beautiful. ’Cos in the end… I photographed this guy who was a porn guy, and I got this tape measure, and his cock was like, that size (makes very large gesture) unerect, so it was probably about (more extreme gesture) that size erect, and it was one of the most beautiful penises I’d ever seen. It was beautiful. And what was really weird about it, was – he hadn’t cleaned it. So when I photographed him the first time, it was really dirty, but it was so big. And I was too embarrassed to kind of go, “It’s not clean…” So I didn’t say anything. But the second time, it was really beautiful. And I kind of got into this aesthetic of the penis.

“And then I realised that the reason that male nudes are not enjoyed, or aestheticised by gay men, or by women, is because heterosexual men don’t like the idea of looking at male nudes. They don’t want to be labelled with a homosexual label. So if you look at history, it’s totally subjugated.

KP: Were you a fan of Mapplethorpe?

RW: He was kind of stylised. He made them look like flowers and things like that. And he liked black men as well, and I know it sounds weird but that’s not the same aesthetic as a white, WASPy bloke – it’s a totally different idea.

KP: Why?

RW: ’Cos it’s a gay man’s obsession with a certain type of man. And that’s not for the general public. His target is not like…

KP: But is your target ever the general public? As opposed to whatever your own obsessions are?

RW: Yes. Always. My thing with that whole book was saying that male nudity is OK, and that we should all think it’s OK.

KP: Were you saying that to yourself as much as anyone else?

RW: (thinks) Yeah. No, totally. I learned a lot about myself. And I can look at blokes’ cocks. And that’s why I can talk to gay men about sex, ’cos I’m like, “I’ve been there, guys”. I mean, that’s almost as good as doing it, really.

KP: Wasn’t the book part of a campaign for prostate cancer awareness?

RW: Yeah, absolutely. ’Cos one in 10 men get it, which is quite a lot. They really wanted me to do celebrities, ’cos I’d done celebrities, but male celebrities don’t do nudes, really. They were going, “Can you get Jude Law?”. And I was like, “No way am I going to ask Jude”.

KP: Why not?

RW: ’Cos it wasn’t what it was about. It wasn’t about him showing his cock.

KP: But he is a beautiful, beautiful man. So from an objective standpoint, why would you not ask him?

RW: Because it would have been all about his cock. And I’m not saying it would have been all about his cock and not just about cocks. Do you understand what I mean?

KP: Em…

RW: I think he would have done it, if I’d have said it to him. And you know what? We couldn’t get a sponsor. Nobody would sponsor Male Nudes, no-one would have anything to do with it. No-one would publish any of the cock photos, no magazines featured it. A couple of gay magazines featured it. And it was really kind of frustrating, really, to have done all the work, and in some ways my heart wasn’t even in it. They had to drag me out of bed to shoot it. I was like, (childish whine) noooo, I don’t wanna do a male nude today… But in the end I got really into … really into the dick. It was really weird. (adopts a film-voiceover baritone) The dick. (pause, then quietly) …I did it, as well. I did a nude as well.

KP: Did you!

RW: My girlfriend did one of me on holiday. And then I did one in studio with my assistant. ’Cos there was a documentary on it as well, we did a documentary along with another production company. And this guy Chris – he did the film with me, and he was like, “You’ve gotta do it”. And he’s such a fucking bastard. So I was like, “Well… I’ll do it if you do it”. And there’s actually a photo in the book, of him and the sound guy, naked. But I was like, “I don’t wanna do it, ohh, I really don’t wanna do it...”. And so finally I was there, and I had my hand in front of my dick... and then I finally went like, “Oh, awright”, and I went like that (whips hand away) …And he laughed. (Pained smile) What a bastard.

KP: What’s the most important thing you know about being a photographer?

RW: I think, for the photography I do, it’s about having an understanding of people, and wanting to bring that out. Wanting to capture an essence of them, and believing that you can.

KP: You also seem to like to break tension on shoots. Was there ever a point, maybe when you were younger, when you were more serious?

RW: No, I’m never serious. And that doesn’t necessarily mean my photographs aren’t serious. But people give you more when they’re not nervous. So why would you make them nervous? That’s a trick that a lot of photographers don’t seem to understand. They’d rather make you nervous, have a power thing over you. And I don’t get that. Why would you want to have power over someone, in any way shape or form? What’s the point?