Rankin — Bellazon

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Reeyo

Posts: 4937

#1

John Rankin Waddell (born 1966, Paisley, Glasgow) is a British portrait and fashion photographer. His subjects have included Britney Spears, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Kylie Minogue, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Spice Girls, Holly Valance, Cate Blanchett, Damien Hirst, Queen Elizabeth II and Tony Blair.

http://www.rankin.co.uk/

Do people still PIP anymore?

Posts: 3014

#2

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/showbiz/celeb...86908-21831746/

ONE WEEK he is persuading Sven Goran Eriksson to pull his shirt over his head goalscorer-style and run around a living room cheering like a crazed football fanatic. The next he could be trying to find the right lighting in the shadow of Number Ten, and sharing his thoughts on the plight of the displaced peoples of the Congo with Gordon Brown. And the next, he is drizzling sweet melted chocolate up and down Heidi Klum’s perfect torso.

It’s pretty safe to say that few men ever born in Scotland have as exciting a work calendar as superstar photographer Rankin. The award winning camera man, 43, has taken the picture of just about every major model, actor, statesman, rocker and celebrity in the world, and created some of the most iconic pop culture images of recent years.

But while he is the first to admit that it would be impossible to get bored taking pictures of the highest profile women in the lowest cut clothes, the man christened John Rankin Waddell, from Paisley, has spent the last year diversifying his portfolio faster than a rogue pensions advisor.

As well as his shots of the honeys and world leaders, he has just finished an innovative public art project, Rankin Live, where he took pictures of 1500 members of the public for charity. He has also recently made two visits to war torn displacement camps in the Congo.

And he has also just launched an eye catching new television commercials for Kleenex, featuring celebrities like Sven, Emma Bunton, Tom Hardy and Bob Geldof letting loose like we have never seen them before.

He said he just wants to try his hand at as many different projects as he can to see what he, and long time collaborator Chris Cottam who also worked on the Kleenex ads, can get away with.

Rankin said: “We don’t have any specific plan, but what it’s about for is is not sitting on our laurels and concentrating on stuff we have done in the past. You’re only ever as good as your last or current project, so you’ve always got to keep thinking of new things. I’m always trying to challenge myself in what we get the chance to do, and our last trip to the Congo was very different. I’m also going out to South Africa with the BBC in January to do a bit on South African photographers, and I’m doing another thing with the BBC in Hollywood. We’ve also been saying that Chris and I should do a radio show for a laugh on our website, and doing the commercial for Kleenex has been an amazing experience, we’re really proud of it. But I’ve never stopped doing photo shoots, I’d still doing them all the time and I love doing them. I’m not the kind of guy who says ‘they have to come to me’, if the job is any good I’ll pretty much go anywhere, all I need is light and a camera and you’re quids in.”

Born in Paisley, Rankin’s family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire, when he was nine. Although he briefly flirted with accountancy as a teenager, he very wisely ditched the abacus and pocket protector look in favour of a long lens and click shutter.

He studied photography at the London College of Printing, and after starting out as a photographer in the late 80s, quickly discovered he had a knack for portraits, and a love for featuring gorgeous women in them.

He founded the ultra hip style magazine Dazed and Confused, and taking the fashion and beauty world by storm, rose to become one of the top snappers on the planet with pretty girls queuing up at his door to be Ranked, virtually chronicling the Cool Britannia era single handedly.

These days it is easier to list the celebrities whom he hasn’t photographed, as his subject list stretches from Buckingham Palace to Hollywood and every red carpet rugrat in-between. Some of his most famous muses include supermodels Heidi Klum, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, and Lindsay Lohan and Cindy Crawford are recent subjects.

But while he is most famous for his portrait skills and the ability to get emotion, and often artistic nudity, out of his subjects, Rankin has also uses his talents for humanitarian reasons. He has created campaigns on issues like domestic violence and works closely with Oxfam, who he went to Congo with, and who benefitted from the Rankin Live profits this summer. A total of 1500 people queued to have their picture taken by him this summer, to create a huge art installation in London.

He said: “I first went to the Congo with Oxfam last year and I have a very good relationship with them. I got the idea for Rankin Live when I was out there in a village and was giving the people a copy of the picture I had just taken of them. We don’t know for certain how much we raised for them with the live shoot, but it should be about 30 or 40 grand hopefully. Chris and I went back to the Congo a few weeks ago for another project. He was making a documentary which will come out in February, but my part was more behind the scenes this time because we got people within the village to take photos themselves, and we took another Scot, Howie B, out there to record music in the village. It was a fantastic trip, but it also makes you angry about what’s going on. Since I was there the last time, the fighting has shifted and the displaced people from where I was staying before have moved further south, so this time people were all staying in a camp, which is quite prevalent in the Congo. There’s eight people to a bed, four families to a small hut, it’s horrific. It became much harder and harder for me to reconcile that with my life here in the UK. It’s real extreme living over there, it’s one of the top five worst places in the world to live, and it made me angry. I’m now at the point where I felt I could come back here and speak to people about it and see if there is anything we can do, I don’t want to be like Bob Geldof as he’s out there on his own, but I feel I’ve got a bit of a platform to help and tell people. The reality is there is a lot of stuff going on in Africa that we should all think about, and see what we can do to help, and not just in terms of aid.”

Rankin got the chance to use that platform just days after his return when he was called in to Number 10 for his second shoot there. He famously shot a gaunt and haunted looking Tony Blair on the eve of the Iraq war invasion in 2003, but is on record as being disappointed with the pictures because Blair did not give him enough time. But he was pleasantly surprised when he met Mr Brown.

“Soon after I got back, I got the chance to speak to Gordon Brown about the Congo, and he seems really genuinely interested in what is going on,” he revealed. I really liked Gordon Brown though. I have to say that I have a lot of confidence in him as a human being, I think he’s great. We talked about our names and the tradition of the name John, then Rankin, and using the middle name instead of the first name, and his family have a similar tradition.”

In addition to his African exploration and date with the Prime Minister, Rankin’s big job just now is the Kleenex advertising project. He and Chris Cottam were given the mission of coaxing hitherto unseen emotions from a range of celebrities. The ads show Sven Goran Eriksson, famed for his cool demeanour, losing the plot and cheering a tissue-bin lob like he has scored the winner at Wembley, while hunky hard man actor Tom Hardy gets all weepy, Spice Girl softie Emma Bunto goes riot grrl bonkers and serious campaigner Bob Geldof laughs himself into tears.

Rankin said that while they are selective about picking ads to direct, this one of the most fun projects he had ever worked on and loved getting inside the heads of the subjects.

He added: “Anyone that knows me knows that I don’t take myself seriously at all, but that I do take my work very seriously. We don’t do many adverts, but you rarely get a message that is bigger than the brand, and for us it’s not just about selling tissues, but people thinking about life in a different context. This will be seen by millions of people, and maybe some of them might think it’s okay to cry at a film or let it all out for once. We worked with the agency to choose the celebrities and hone the script down, but we thought the basic idea of it was lovely. We’ve done a lot of beauty commercials, fashion films and even a feature film, but we wanted to do some more humour based stuff which has an impact with people, and this was a dream job for us. It’s hard to think of people known specially for one thing. Bob was right at the front, someone we all wanted, while we know Tom. He’s gonna be huge. Emma was great, we had the Arctic Monkeys on really loud and she was going absolutely crazy, it’s almost like she had been waiting for the chance to go mad for ages. And Sven was funny. I’m Scottish so for me he was just some geezer, I wasn’t that bothered, but it all went really well.”

Despite all his diverse projects, from the Congo to Downing Street and the tissue box, Rankin’s bread winner is still the simple camera and lighting set up placed correctly in front of someone pretty.

He said: “I did Cindy Crawford last week, she’s amazing, she’s still got it, she really has. And there was a great shoot I did with Heidi Klum, which was for a book I did with her, Heidilicious, which is just out in the UK. It was the last shoot for the book and we were setting up. She comes in and we were talking about ideas for the day. I can’t do the accent but she said to me, ‘all I want is to be covered in chocolate.’ And I’m like, ‘you what?’, she says again, ‘all I want is to be covered in chocolate.’ So we had to go out and buy all this chocolate, she quite literally gets naked in front of me and I poured all this chocolate absolutely all over her body. That was one of the most bizarre and fun shoots I’ve ever done. It wasn’t sexy because she’s married to Seal, but that was a great day. Heidi is like that. She takes the life by the horns and rides it.”

Vanessa_gxox

Posts: 15374

#3

125 Magazine #11

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