Rankin interview: 'This virus has burst the bubble of celebrity worship'

‘I’m just really nosy. I need to know what makes people tick,” says Rankin when asked for the secret of his enduring success. Although the portrait and fashion photographer is best known for his disarming angles on famous faces, Rankin is equally curious about the rest of us. He’s asked us to send him our own snapshots for a new television series, Rankin’s 2020.

Speaking from his family home in London, the 54-year-old says he’s thrilled with the photographs he’s received. “People took powerful shots. I was moved by the image of a handprint on the outside of a care home window, taken by the son of a woman with dementia who doesn’t remember him unless she sees him.

“People were obviously drawn to the water, because I was sent loads of photographs of the sea, waves, rivers. There’s a funny one of a guy with a classic British handlebar moustache in his swimming trunks. People had more fun than I’d imagined. And they were more experimental, particularly with their self-portraits. There’s a great one of a guy washing his face and a gorgeous shot of a woman’s hair falling into her camera.”

As a long-term critic of what he calls “selfie harm”, and “all those stupid face-changing apps that people have been conned into thinking make them look more attractive,” Rankin believes that the pandemic has forced people to dump the filters because they’ve wanted to see the real faces of those they’ve been separated from.

“We’ve all had phone cameras in our pockets for over a decade now,” he says. “We were like toddlers when we first got them: crazy little narcissists. But we’re growing up.”

Born in Paisley in 1966 and raised mostly in a “lower middle-class” street in Yorkshire, John Rankin Wadell tends, in self-portraits, to cross his arms and eyeball the camera like a bouncer. Studying one of these images before we spoke, I thought: there’s no way he’s letting me in. But the stocky Scot’s an engaging conversationalist. Within minutes of the Zoom window popping open, he’s teaching me how to get crisper shots of my unphotographable black dog. I realise what it must feel like to sit beyond his lens, the brief centre of his world.

“I always fall a little in love with my subjects,” he says. “All the photographers I admire do. I do it by talking, empathising. David Bailey gets a stick and prods people in a brilliant and very funny way. Richard Avedon would seduce his subjects.” He pauses. “In my case, I’ve found that humans – famous or not – have a deep need to be seen and understood. People tell me stuff you wouldn’t believe when I’m holding a camera. They tell me their innermost thoughts. It helps that I’ve never been overawed by celebrity.”

Rankin attributes this particular trait to two key childhood moments, both involving his father (who died in 2005, within three weeks of Rankin’s mother). The first took place when he was around 12.

“My dad got his education from the Reader’s Digest and I remember being at a party with him and telling him, ‘This is all a bit posh, isn’t it!’ He told me he made more money than the other parents there. I was impressed.”

The second moment came when he witnessed his father cheating at golf. “It’s a very painful memory because it changed my whole perception of him. I couldn’t believe he swept aside all his values because winning was so important to him. I grew up five years in that moment. It also allowed me to break away from his expectations and do whatever I wanted. It enabled me to [leave] my accountancy degree to study photography, even though that made my dad so angry he didn’t speak to me for a year.”

Rankin met Jefferson Hack at his new college and they founded Dazed & Confused magazine together in the early Nineties. “I took the conceptual approach to photography I’d studied at college and applied it to fashion shoots,” he says. “People were turned upside down or set on fire or [photographed with] their backs to the camera. I didn’t care about fashion then and I don’t now. I’m always asked to name my favourite designer and I say ‘George from Asda’.”

It was during this period that Rankin earned his reputation as the wild man of British photography. While other photographers kowtowed to the rich and famous, Rankin played around, poked fun and broke taboos. “I photographed a Michael Jackson lookalike for the cover,” he says. “When you opened the magazine it read “FAKE”. I was critiquing both Jackson and the cultural response to him during a period when he was making himself white. It seemed the less authentic he became the more we put him on a pedestal. One of my favourite moments of the 1990s was Jarvis Cocker mooning Jackson at the Brit Awards.”

Other aspects of Rankin’s wildness were less admirable. He earned a reputation for throwing cameras and behaving badly at parties. “I didn’t really fit into that glamorous world,” he says “and it took me a long time to realise that didn’t matter.” He split up from his first wife, the actress Kate Hardie, while their son Lyle was very young. These days, he’s a more placid soul, 10 years into his marriage to the model Tuuli Shipster, with two therapists on the payroll to help him handle his “emotional Tourette’s”.

“I’ve been to 10 Downing Street three times and Buckingham Palace once,” he says, “and I’ve learnt how different people can be from their media image. Gordon Brown was always portrayed as this dour, depressing guy, even in the Left-wing press. I found him to be the opposite: warm, funny, inquisitive. A delight. I had 20 minutes with Tony Blair and he didn’t say a word to me. Of course, I could have got Blair on a bad day and Brown on a good one.”

The Queen refused to hold a sword in her portrait, telling Rankin, “I don’t really like my hands”.

“It was a lovely moment,” he says. “I’m not a royalist but I’ve got so much respect for her as a person. Most of the people I photograph chose the spotlight. She didn’t, and she’s made an incredible sacrifice.”

Although Rankin’s all-time favourite subjects have been models and actors, the one photograph that continues to gnaw away at him is of an anonymous woman he shot for his 2009 project “Rankin Live!” “I just couldn’t take a picture she liked,” he says. “I tried so many things, but there was nothing I could do with that woman because she just didn’t like herself. That really haunts me.”

One benefit of the pandemic, he says, is the way it has revealed the truth about certain famous people. “This virus has burst the bubble of celebrity worship. I’ve loved seeing some of them called out when they’ve complained about feeling ‘in prison’ or whatever when we know their prison is a f------ mansion. Looking at where some people have been locked down, I feel guilty about having a garden. But listen. I hope this TV series helps us to see each other more clearly. People always say we read to know we’re not alone. We can look at photographs for the same reason.”

'Rankin’s 2020' is on Sky Arts at 8pm on Tuesday