RANKIN’S PLAY
A New Book of Stunning Images of Musicians
Known simply as Rankin, his professional working name, UK-born photographer John Rankin Waddell has cemented himself as one of the greatest and most symbolic British portrait and fashion photographers of his time. An artist that set the fundamental tone for pop culture photography and imagery in the mid- to late-90s and early 2000s, Rankin’s work has resonated and reverberated throughout the world of music. Rizzoli now presents Play, a culmination of Rankin’s expansive and emblematic oeuvre on music portraiture.
After co-founding the avant-garde publication Dazed & Confused in 1991, Rankin began his exploration of the cutting edge facets of the fashion, art, and music worlds. Finding balanced coalescence between all things gritty and underground as well as the stars and artists more widely admired, Rankin and Dazed established the slick undercurrents of groundbreaking style and culture.
Play falls into different chapters and is loosely chronological, beginning with Rankin’s first professional shoots in the 1990s in which he first found his footing in abounding creativity and the ability to paint subjects in a never-two-dimensional light. Rankin’s camera has the tendency to angle sharply up or down, professing a sort of invasive and in-your-face nature. This became increasingly recurrent following his purchase of the Mamiya RB67, a medium format camera that allowed Rankin to get up close and personal with his subjects. In one of the book’s excerpts, Rankin comments, “In the 1990s my lens felt like a microscope. A lot of the time I was so close to the subject, they were almost touching the glass.”
After his first serious press session with Björk in 1994, Rankin later progressed to photograph some of the largest and favorite names in the UK music scene such as David Bowie, Richard Ashcroft, Radiohead, Pete Doherty, and Elton John. Eventually, his subject matter hopped across the pond as he began more commonly working in LA and the rest of the U.S. The stars he photographed included names such as Britney Spears, Madonna, Pharrell, Justin Timberlake, Miley Cyrus, Outkast, and the group that would set his work apart and land his photographs onto birthday cakes in grocery stores — the Spice Girls.
“Going back through my archive,” says Rankin in the introduction to the book, “the funniest thing that struck me was how many of these images the artists didn’t like at the time. Their hair was out of place, they didn’t like the concept of the shoot, they didn’t like me. But now, how perfectly those images seem to embody who they were; as if all of the little bits that make a shoot, the hair, makeup, styling, come together to codify their career through imagery.”
