Rankin interview: 'Photography is great foreplay!'

PhotoRadar: What do you like about advertising photography?
Rankin: What I like about advertising photography is the ability to work in an industry which I’m doing something I love and enjoy. I get paid well so I can have a really great team behind me, and it gives me the potential to do my own projects, but it also puts me in contact with and allows me to financially bring people in who can help me do stuff, beyond what the means would be if I was just an art photographer.

I’m obsessed with photography, photography’s my blood, it’s my heart, it’s what keeps me alive. I'd do it for free – but don't tell anybody.

How often do you get to do work just for yourself?
I’d say probably 50-60% of the photography I do is for me, and the rest I do to pay for that. I’m obsessed with photography, photography’s my blood, it’s my heart, it’s what keeps me alive, I love it. I’d do it for free – but don’t tell anybody.

Do you shoot other genres other than people, i.e. landscapes?
When I first started I decided I would never use a specific style, I would never try and make my name with one way of shooting, and I would never stick to one subject matter, I would just do what pleased me. That excites my life, I get to go on trips to South Africa and do documentary photography, I do some landscapes, some still life and I’ll do portraits. Of course portraits is what I’m known for because people are interested in celebrities, it’s a natural instinct for people to move to that work, because it’s the one bit of my work you can put on the cover of a magazine, or you can write an article about.

What is about portraits that you enjoy shooting so much?
I love taking portraits because I love people. That’s the thing that I get so much out of, because I actually enjoy the discourse, the collaboration, trying to draw someone out – pushing people’s buttons, that kind of thing. So that’s always something I come back to because I like doing it so much.

Do you enjoy your photography more now or when you were first starting out?
I think I probably enjoy photography as much now as when I first started, I think there was probably a lull in the middle where I was doing very big commercial jobs and I felt there was a lot of pressure on me to kind of perform. It took me a long time to realise they’re paying me to have an opinion and to be really forthright about that opinion.

Which part of the process of photography is it you enjoy the most? Is it meeting the people, setting up a shot, viewing the final image or something else?
I love that moment of connection that you have between yourself and a subject, and you know, I used to really love that bit when the contact sheet would come back and I’d open it and go “ooh did I get it, did I get it?” and go through and it’d be really exciting, but now with digital, it’s immediate so it’s kind of like making love in a way.

It used to be making love through Boots the chemist, you know you’d send your photos in and a week later you’d get them back and go oh that was great, whereas now it’s immediate. So you and whoever you’re photographing can really connect with each other, and can actually have some sort of discourse, or intercourse.

Do you enjoy shooting celebrities? Do you ever get any tricky customers?
I like shooting everybody, I don’t specifically enjoy shooting celebrities but I like the challenge of a celebrity that possibly hasn’t been photographed in an honest and open way. I do get tricky ones, I’ve had a few tricky ones over the years and the thing that I find works the best with people who are difficult is just to be very direct and very honest with them, and if you do that it disarms them – because they’re not used to it.

They’re not used to people going “you know what I don’t like your hair – you need to do your hair, I don’t think it works”, or “maybe you should just push your chin out a little bit”, you know, stuff that people don’t normally say to them or “maybe you should put a little bit more make up on”. I mean in a nice way, I’m never horrible, but if you are honest with people and say you take the first photo and you look it and you say “No, that’s terrible, that looks terrible” and then that kind of creates a bit of trust with them because they feel like actually they’re in it for me as well, I’m in it for them.

That’s the only thing I’ve kind of been critical with myself about, I always try and make people look good, I think I should stop doing that, I should try and make people look a bit more ugly!

I love photographing my wife, I find it really compelling and exciting – it’s quite good foreplay.

Is it also any different photographing someone very close to you, like your partner?
I always used to say to my ex-girlfriends that I could never take a good photograph of them, because there was too much of an intimacy between us but actually the real thing is, if there’s a proper intimacy between you, there’s a kind of shorthand and I love photographing my wife, I find it really compelling and exciting – it’s quite good foreplay.

Why did you get involved with the BT Business Essence of the Entrepreneur competition?
I think I’ve always been somebody that thinks that the business side of what I do, whether it’s art or commerce in terms of commercial photography is really important and I have a great respect for business and entrepreneurialism.

I think I get a lot of criticism from artists or other photographers because I am a businessman, and I really pride myself on it. So, there’s a little bit of me that thinks “two fingers to all you people who think you’re artists” because it’s all a business, everything’s a business, it doesn’t matter if it’s in the Sistine Chapel or it’s on the walls of the Tate Modern or if it’s in the White Cube – it’s all a business.

I think it’s the same passion for what you’re doing, a lot of the guys that do this are really passionate about it, and really believe in it. Some of the projects, some of the businesses are really very serving the community in a really positive way, so I kind of like that and I kind of believe in it – I don’t have that division, I don’t divide it up

How important do you think image editing is?
I used to think it was the most important thing in the world to image edit, but now I kind of thing it’s easier to collaborate with art directors, I used to be quite single minded about which image should be used, but I found that when I take photographs, my hit rate’s really high, I might get a sort of 30% hit rate where I think the photographs are good so I tend to just be easy going about it.

I use Photoshop completely and entirely - it’s really just a darkroom in a computer.

What do you think about the use of Photoshop?
I use Photoshop completely and entirely, and in a way what has happened with Photoshop, it’s taken over from darkroom techniques – it’s really just a darkroom in a computer. Everything we do now, we’ve been doing for years as photographers, it’s just that now everybody talks about it.

I’m an advocate of [Photoshop] because I use it, it’s a very useful tool to have in your box because you can do it immediately – you don’t have to send it off to a third party, but I think it’s been overused by a lot of photographers and I think that came from celebrities and editors and people wanting to look perfect, I kind of look back at some of the pictures I did maybe 5 or 6 years ago and I think “woah, I need to revisit that and I have revisited a lot of them and tried to tone it down a little bit," but it’s like anything when you first get it, you think “wahey, let’s use it, let’s really go over the top”

A lot of my work has actually been about being critical about it and opening it up and being humorous about it. I put my face into other celebrities faces, because it’s incredibly easy to do that. You can recreate people, I remember I did a photograph of a Michael Jackson lookalike and we put him on the cover of Dazed and Confused as Michael Jackson, it had Dazed and it was him unretouched underneath saying “Faked” and everybody thought it was Michael Jackson, because you can do that, it’s that easy.

Finally, what tips would you give to fellow photographers hoping to follow in your footsteps?

Don’t follow in anybody’s footsteps, when you want to do something creative because you’ve always got to find your own way. Believe in yourself, experiment as much as you can, take advantage of your personality and parties, because that’s where a lot of work’s done and try and see the world in your own way. If you start to copy people, you’ll never be successful.

The exhibition of BT Business Essence of the Entrepreneur Award 2009 runs until 28 February 2010 at gallery@oxo, London. For more information, visit the gallery@oxo website.

All images © Rankin.