Rankin:
Pecked Alive By 1000 Birds

Rankin is barefoot in shorts and a tee-shirt with a jarring image that reminds me of an Escher graphic.

He moves his own equipment, although there are numerous assistants and flurries of fit girls in cut off tops hurrying about with armfuls of books, fresh coffee, fruit juice, ice cream cones.

Rankin is shooting dancer-choreographer Akram Khan while I glance through Male Nudes. When they take a break, Rankin leafs through the pages and stabs at the shot of himself. 'If you take nudes you should be prepared to get your own kit off,' he says.

He sits, legs planted like two trees, and lights a cigar. Rankin in the altogether was taken by an ex-girlfriend. 'I had to train up for it.' He grabs hold of a chunk of gut. 'Look at this, I'm totally out of shape.' He's done about 14 or 15 books, Rankin's lost count. Male Nudes is his least favourite. 'I don't fancy men. But I like the aesthetics of cocks. Does that make sense?'

He doesn't expect an answer. Akram Khan and I shrug while Rankin keeps talking about cocks and art, how he adores women, and how he's got to get back in shape. He's bubbling with ideas, a magnetic force, the sun around which all things turn, the studio, the magazines, his new film. The universe? He sweeps his hand through his hair. His eyes are restless. His face radiates energy and passion. You get the feeling that inside Rankin there is wild beast, something caged that he's only just managing to keep under control.

We go back to Male Nudes. The book is witty, ironic, outrageous. Archetypal Rankin. A cock in a hot dog bun covered in ketchup; a guy in a role reversal sitting on the loo with his pants around his ankles; a cock measuring 6½ inches against a tape measure; Rankin with a faint tan, body all angles and curves, kind of glamorous.

The cigar break ends and Rankin's on his feet, moving fast on short strong legs. He adjusts the lights. Jacks up the volume on the stereo. Indian music pours from big speakers. Akram Khan spins, curls like a kite on currents of air, his limbs liquid mercury dissolving and reforming. The camera cracks like the jaws of a python. Rankin sits with his legs stretched out either side of a camera on a low tripod. Yeah, nice! Yeah, good one! Snap. Snap. The walls are faintly rounded. Akram Khan could be inside an egg or the womb. It's hot under the big spot. An assistant mops Akram's brow. Cigar smoke hangs in the air. The music is numbing, druggy, mesmerising. Rankin keeps shooting. Nothing makes him happier than viewing life through his camera lens.

Photography to me is an addiction. I get jittery after a couple of days without a camera. Everyone who knows me says I'm happiest when I'm shooting.

The quote is from Rankin's The Hard Sell, a retrospective of magazine and TV ads done over the last five years, the majority familiar to me, to most people, Rimmel, Dove, Elle MacPherson Intimates, Vodafone, Dom Perignon, Kookai, Nokia, Nike, Guinness, the TV Foundation commercial for Torture Victims, an eclectic mix that combines the zany, the blatantly erotic and shoots to raise money or awareness. Rankin lends his time and his name to good causes with a genuine desire to put back into life with the same generosity that life has provided him.

Rankin moved from his native Glasgow to Yorkshire aged nine and from there to London at 15. He lost his tartan twang, as he put it, at his big London comprehensive, a tough state school where you had to fit in. Not that fitting in was Rankin's goal when he was accepted at the London College of Printing.

'The college was good because it was shit,' he says. 'We didn't learn a thing. But there was loads of equipment and what you had to do was teach yourself how to be an entrepreneur.'

At college, Rankin got involved in publishing magazines and with Jefferson Hack in 1991 launched Dazed & Confused, a hip quarterly defining nineties zeitgeist and as influential today as it was when it first hit the street. 'There was a big recession after the Thatcher years,' he says. 'There was no money. No one was going to give you a job. Jobs were for people who knew people. You had to do it yourself or you went hungry.'

He cites his pals who did the same thing. Damien Hirst organised his first two shows himself. Dinos and Jake Chapman did the same. Damien Albarn took Blur around the country doing one-nighters, getting their name out there.

'It was ten years after Malcolm MacLaren and the Sex Pistols. Everyone was clubbing, taking ecstasy. No one thought, I know, let's start Brit Pop and Brit Art. It was serendipity. It just happened. A recession is always creative. When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.' He pauses. 'It's funny, but all those people I was friends with were poor like me, now they're all rich.'

He sits pondering this phenomena and glances around the studio. He employs 16 assistants and there's a staff of more than 40 working on the other side of a flimsy partition on Dazed & Confused, the fashion mag RANK, Another Magazine, AnOther Man. He likes adding new titles. With gallery owner Alex Proud, Rankin co-founded the photographic art book publishers Vision On, launching the house with his own books Nudes, Snog and CeleBritation, a collection of celebrity portraits.

Rankin's a man in a hurry. He doesn't wait for magazines to come looking for him, he launches a magazine. He starts a publishing house. He makes the short film, Perfect, nominated as best British short, then goes out and develops the feature The Life of the Saints, now doing the rounds of the festivals. 'I have this Presbyterian work ethic,' he adds, ' Glaswegians are famous for being aggressive and I put my aggression into my work.'

That work ethic was instilled in him by his parents. Both dead now, he misses them still. Rankin is proud that he made them proud, but I put it to him that he is his own creation, he took the negative and blew up big. He leans forward and looks me straight in the eye. 'I made a decision to be successful as a photographer,' he says. 'I did anything. Everything. I did all the shit work, like bands setting up their own gigs. I threw stuff at the wall hoping it would stick. I didn't care what anyone else thought. I didn't take any prisoners.'

An assistant appears with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. Rankin lights another cigar and explains what he means. 'I didn't want people to like me. That wasn't important. I was convinced of my own talent. I was always my own critic, always looking for the next thing, always trying to get better.'

Does this account for his reputation for being hard to work with? The girls in Atomic Kitten called him a misogynist, 'and the joke is they don't even know what it means,' he responds. 'If I've got a reputation for being forthright, it comes from working at being the best. I love what I do and I've worked to have the freedom to do exactly what I want to do. When I was younger, I wasn't always polite. I went out drinking and taking drugs, and the cocktail doesn't always make you a nice guy.' He laughs. 'Even my images are confrontational. I got a reputation for arrogance, but I was also naïve.'

He pulls a sour face as he finishes the glass of wine. He calls one of the girls over. He doesn't like the Chardonnay. 'Let's try the Chablis,' he says, and lights a third cigar.

Rankin pulls at his gut again and grins. He enjoys life. He's just turned forty. It's a milestone, but feels lucky that photographers have a long life span. He admires David Bailey and believes his work is better now than ever. 'There's a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can't keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.'

One recent shift in Rankin's modus operandi is his experimentation with digital technology. 'When you use film, you take a Polaroid and spend half the day trying to recreate it. With digital the process is more organic. I move between digital and film, even on the same shoot. I think this allows you to be more experimental.'

Rankin was one of the ten photographers commissioned to shoot the Queen for her Golden Jubilee. Is he becoming more establishment, less the bad boy of Pop Art?

He thinks about that and tells me he has a son, Lyle, aged ten, who keeps him grounded. 'Lyle takes a few photos, but he wants to be a rock star or an animator. He's not sure, but he's very determined. He's like me. He has a great memory and he's very political in his perceptions of the world.'

I'm not sure how this ties in. Rankin explains: he's not establishment or anti-establishment. He's a photographer. 'My name will get photos in magazines. It's nice. I feel privileged that I can do work that's not always for myself. It gives you a different experience. It balances you out.'

Rankin shoots for Debt Relief in Africa, AIDs, women's charities. 'I don't like talking about politics. It's best to do things and not talk about it. You have to take some responsibility, do stuff for others. My generation, we weren't only into fashion and style, we got involved socially.'

I go through Portraits: Keira Knightley (Harpers & Queen), Monica Bellucci (German Vogue), U2 (Vanity Fair), Christina Ricci (Marie Claire), Eminem (Blender), Kate Winslet (Tatler), Franka Potente (Max), Ewan McGregor (Arena), Quentin Tarantino (Time Out), George Clooney (The Guardian Magazine), Jake Gyllenhaal (Dazed & Confused), Tony Blair (The Financial Times Magazine).

That's the page where I stop. Portraits is vibrant in colour with few shots in black and white. This is one of them. 'I saw Blair as dark. He was at war. It showed in his face. There was conflict in his face. That's what I saw and that's what I shot.' He pauses, sips his wine, looks reflective. 'If you don't believe in someone, you shouldn't shoot them. I had faith in Blair, I was a big supporter, but I didn't support the war.'

The disappointment shows in his expression. Rankin's face is mobile, full of light and shadow like shifting clouds: what you see is what you get. He wants to change the subject. He'd rather talk about photography. The shot of Blair, he says, looks like it was taken in a photo booth for a passport. 'There was another photographer before me. He was shuffled out and I was shuffled in. I was given ten minutes, which doesn't show any respect.'

Respect is important to Rankin. The photographer has to respect his subject and the subject has to respect the photographer. He loves shooting nudes and nudes require a greater level of respect, a bond, a collaboration. 'I think all photographers are drawn to the female form, as I've said, I really love women. The nude is fascinating to me, male and female, the form is pure, it’s always new, it's always exciting.'

Rankin pioneered the use of non-professional nude models in ad campaigns, but whether the girls are silky goddesses from the catwalk or girls you might meet serving pints in the pub, you are drawn into a narrative world of female secrets and sexuality. Rankin's images tell stories. Like the best erotic fiction, I am drawn equally to those fashion shots where the cut of a dress promises rather than conceals, a promise captured in the creamy freshness of a bare arm, the light on a long slender neck, the contours of a shapely back.

The first time Kate Moss met Rankin she was nude. 'When he takes a picture he knows what he wants,' she wrote in the Foreword to Rankin Works, 'and there is really no chance of being anyone but who you are, even if you try. You can trust him. I trust him.' Kate's more than a supermodel. She's a shrewd lady.

The wine's way down the bottle. We’re almost done. One last thing, the name Rankin. Just Rankin? Born John Rankin Waddell, Rankin is a Christian name, more common in Scotland, the name of both his father and his grandfather on his mother's side. 'I was always called Rankin,' he says. 'It's been lucky for me. My grandfather had a lot of grandchildren, but I was named after him and I think he liked me more than the others because of that. Bailey was Bailey. Avedon was Avedon. I thought Rankin was quite clever. You have to play to your strengths.'

The interview is over for the day and continues the following morning at the screening room at the Soho Hotel off Dean Street. The Lives of the Saints, Rankin's first feature is getting its first showing before going to the festivals. Produced by Dazed Film and TV, written by Tony Grisoni – who scripted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - and directed by Rankin with his commercials partner Chris Cottom, the film is a dark and violent morality tale that may not find a big audience but will, like much of Rankin's work, earn cult status.

'The leap from making a short to a feature is the same as the difference between climbing Snowdon and climbing Everest,' he says, describing with his two hands that modest mountain in Wales and the world's greatest peak. 'Making a movie is like being pecked alive by a thousand birds. There is so much to do, so much to think about, so many people asking questions.'

Francis Ford Coppola once said a film is created three times: first you write it, second you shoot it, third you edit. Rankin reached the same conclusion. 'It's one of those pursuits you can't do on your own and when it's done, you don't have a film until you sit down with your editor.' His editor was Chris Gill and Rankin's praise knows no bounds. 'He's my new best friend.'

Rankin grows reflective again. 'I'm sure it's going to get nailed by the critics. As soon as you do something there are people out there who want to pull it down. But I don't care what other people think. You have to trust your own vision. I'm my own best critic.'

If The Lives of the Saints doesn't do well, is he going to stick to photography? Rankin looks back at me as if I'm crazy. With Chris Cottom, he's already developing the script for another feature. 'I can't write, but I'm not a bad script editor,' he says. 'This one's dark as well. But it will find an audience.'

I have no doubt. Rankin does what he wants to do and achieves what he sets it to achieve. He made an award-winning short. He'll make an award-winning feature. He doesn't take any prisoners. His photographs since he hit the street in 1991 form the backdrop of our lives, a part of our reality, our history, and if anyone asks me who I think is the most influential photographer working in Britain today my answer, in a word, is Rankin.