Rankin: Unfashionable: 30 Years of Fashion Photography, Afterword by Jefferson Hack

“If I was in the driving seat of my photography, then you were definitely in the passenger seat.” That’s how Rankin describes our journey together. It’s an accurate metaphor for the ​Confused y​ears, not least because Rankin did drive everywhere in a beat-up Ford Escort that regularly broke down (once quite spectacularly on the Elephant & Castle roundabout, when the passenger-side door fell off). I rode shotgun most of the 1990s with a close eye on the road and the tape cassette. He was a high-speed driver and he took no prisoners. When we were students together at the London College of Printing working on ​Untitled​–the student magazine for which Rankin went on to win Student Photographer of the Year–the entire working issue had been left on the roof of his car (encased in floppy discs and bromide acetates) to become specks of dust somewhere in the grime and gristle of the Old Kent Road. That’s just how focused Rankin was on driving full speed ahead into the future without once looking back in the rearview mirror.

Unfashionable​–a title loaded with irony and double meaning–is Rankin’s thirty-year monograph of image-making inspired by and related to fashion and beauty. In ‘The Heroism of Vision,’ the chapter of ​On Photography that discusses beauty, Susan Sontag describes the history of photography as “a struggle between two different imperatives… beautification… and truth-telling.” As an artist, Rankin would forever be balancing the contradiction of creating artifice while simultaneously questioning reality in his photography. They say geniuses are those who can hold two opposing ideas in their head at the same time. When you enter into Rankin’s photography, he transforms everyone else into the genius in the room. That is his gift, to transfer complex, often contradictory ideas into simple-to-understand, immediate pop iconography.

The first series of stories by Rankin and ​Dazed & Confused​’s first fashion director, Katie Grand, present a remarkable legacy of intent. In the stories ‘Weep’, ‘Big Girl’s Blouse,’ and ‘Hungry?,’ Rankin was challenging every and any fashion convention, ripping it up, sending it up, spoofing and trashing beauty norms. He also looked to glamorize the hidden, by revealing and tackling taboo subjects like age and size in models. The mission was to humanize fashion–to bring his sense of reality to some of fashion photography’s unattainable clich​és​. The images are at once sensational, seductive, politically charged, and questioning; this way of coming out into the world seemed so normal to us all at the time.

If Rankin was liable for speeding in the mid-1990s, Katie Grand was holding the map. She literally had her vision for fashion mapped out. Hers is an incredible story worthy of a book in its own right; Rankin and I had started ​Dazed & Confused and soon she became Rankin’s partner and a founding partner, before graduating with a BA in textiles at Central Saint Martins. She had an effervescent energy and galvanized the spirit of the magazine into an exciting platform for emerging designers and photographers introducing new ways of presenting fashion in magazines. They had a relationship that seared into his worldview Katie’s fashion know-how and now, several decades later, the strength of those defining years of living and working together are still very much a part of their bond and their identities as visual artists.

Fashion photography is a team effort, and Rankin has always sought out collaborators who would inform him, push him and add new dimensionality to his work. Most prominently featured in this book alongside Katie are Alister Mackie, Paula Thomas, Miranda Almond, Katie England, and the make-up artists Andrew Gallimore and Ayami Nishimura.

“For photographers there is, finally, no difference–no greater aesthetic advantage–between the effort to embellish the world and the counter-effort to rip off its mask,” continues Sontag in ‘The Heroism of Vision.’ For Rankin’s part, he would always talk about “holding a mirror to society,” something that makes me think now of William Klein’s experiments with mirrors in fashion in the 1960s: an attempt to circumnavigate the male gaze, to play tricks with perspective, and to undermine photography’s pervasive privileging of the ‘decisive moment’. Rankin was holding a mirror to society, but he was also steeped in the photographic histories of David Bailey, Arthur Elgort, Duane Michals, and Patrick Demarchelier, whom he heralds as some of his favourite fashion image-makers of all time.

As Katie and Rankin’s work continued to deepen, and in some places darken, stories such as ‘Faking It,’ ‘Damage,’ ‘Dead Fashionable,’ ‘Pain,’ and ‘Highly Flammable’ showed them poking even more fun at the fabrication of fashion, with Rankin becoming more elaborate in using photography as a tool to talk about the artifice of photography, and to bring a knowing self-criticism to fashion. Early on, to escape growing internal politics at ​Dazed & Confused​–which was now being co-fashion directed by Katy England–they created ​Another​, a supplement that lasted for four issues. This was many years before the official launch of ​AnOther Magazine (for which the name was repurposed), but its imagery is highly entertaining and illuminating even now: the livestock jokes (models mimicking farmyard animals) which became a recurring theme in both their careers started here, as well as much of the theatricality and surrealism of Rankin’s visual gameplaying, where humour is an ever-present foil to fashion.

As Sontag describes, Rankin was simultaneously embellishing and ripping off masks in what was to become an echo of the reality being played out in the new vanguard of digital tabloid media–where images of fashion models off-duty, celebrities caught off-guard and the extreme 24/7 documentation of reality was juxtaposed daily with red-carpet languor and retouched front covers. This new post-truth image of fashion and celebrity icons must have been to Rankin, as an artist, a contradiction that sat front and centre of his view of the world.

‘Spray Paint Kate’ is a great example of this. Live-graffitiing the clothes and her body, the shoot was post-punk performance art as fashion photography. It’s a great story and cover, but the most striking image is provided by its very counterpoint, via the simple black-and-white image of Kate. Here, Rankin’s connection to Kate as a portraitist crackles through the page like electricity through a wire.

There couldn’t be a wider contrast to that simple shot of Kate than ‘Sparkly Gisele’–the glistening glamor and retouched fantasy personified in that image sizzles next to Kate’s cool, unkempt stare. The glistening, sci-fi vision of Gisele and the portrait of Kate are like Rankin’s yin and yang: the twin polar extremes of beautification and truth-telling that he will continue to explore throughout his work.

By the mid-90s, Rankin was becoming a hot industry name, and excursions into glossy-magazine territory naturally followed. ​Allure​, Harper’s Bazaar​, ​Citizen K​, ​Nylon​, ​Geo–​ the results are more conventional, perhaps, with Rankin seceding control, but taking him to interesting new locations with bigger budgets and bigger models. For Rankin, I’m sure there is no difference between personal work, editorial work, or advertising–“as long as it’s good,” as he would say–but for me the car was parked somewhere in East London and Rankin was off on a jet-plane exploring some other place.

It was only a matter of time before Rankin launched his own magazine, where he really could stick two fingers up at everything and anyone (I’m certain that also pertains to me!) and just do exactly as he pleased. Hunger (which comes in part from the movie ​The Hunger featuring David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, and in part from Rankin’s exhibition title Visually Hungry​) is the evolution of his debut title, ​RANK​, and its images dominate the first part of this book. It’s now Rankin’s main focus for his fashion work, a world that really appeals to him because he’s so easily bored. “I saw how instantaneous fashion was and I loved that,” he explains. There’s an incredible clarity and immediacy to his ideas for Hunger​. You see the master photographer at work without inhibitions. The concentrated rush to connect with an idea is finely honed. Fashion photography does not sit in the service of selling clothing. For Rankin it’s another form of narrative communication, with all the humour, roleplay, ritual, tease, and transformation of his early work for ​Dazed & Confused.​ If that was post-modern punk, this is post-Tate Modern, conceptual punk.

I remember when Rankin showed me the first set of contact sheets of his shoot with Kate Moss for ‘Spray Paint Kate’. She was the first super he’d photographed, and it absolutely blew him away. It was then he realized how a seriously experienced model can make such a difference to his fashion work. Through the book you see the icons–Helena, Eva, Heidi and Milla–simultaneously fetishized and distorted as beauties; they bring a new collaborative energy to his representation of female beauty. The Gisele contact sheet, for ​Citizen K​, is truly as entertaining and enlightening as looking at Bert Stern’s contact sheets of Marilyn Monroe. Here is the crystallisation of a fashion moment in time, when joy, optimism, the transference of youth, and sexual promise meet sexual empowerment.

But none is more celebrated or more reimagined in these pages than Tuuli, Rankin’s wife and collaborator, and the most chameleon-like of all the models he has worked with. Like David Bailey’s amazing, decades-long documentation of Catherine Bailey, Rankin’s and Tuuli’s collaboration is a phenomenal coming together of two artists who, as husband and wife, can legitimately express intimacy, play sexual roles, and push beauty ideals further than anyone. It makes me wonder if Rankin’s feminine alter ego is actually Tuuli–and if, by way of some phantasmagorical roleplay, the power and transference is also reversed through the images they make together? The images featured here are just a fraction of Rankin’s and Tuuli’s canon, from which the book Tuulitastic​ has been published.

In the stories ‘Less Is More Make-Up,’ ‘Head in the Clouds,’ ‘Crystal Amaze’ (what looks to be a camp homage to Richard Avedon’s ‘Dovima With Elephants’), and ‘It’s Not That I’m So Smart; I Just Stay With Problems Longer,’ we see narrative fashion editorial collapsing. It’s as if, in today’s editorial context, fashion photography is too long-winded, too self-indulgent for Rankin. These are images as fashion haikus; individually as powerful as they are as part of a set. Designed either for billboards or Instagram feeds, they are images whose power is their very detachment from the context of fashion itself. Fashion photography through the ages has in its own way prepared us for this moment, when the photograph as a digital entity, unbound by humans, bound only to algorithms, is artificially creating a new reality and a new fashion consciousness. A new generation is now making fashion photography, styling themselves and creating new beauty ideals, fashion labels and style identities without magazines, without clients, without backers, without permission, just because they can.

As an artist and self-publisher, Rankin has pioneered self-reflection in fashion photography. This is his direct link to this new generation, their visual stream of consciousness representing an unlocking of photography and in many ways an unfashioning of fashion itself.

Yet at the same time, Rankin’s lens is always anchored on moments of personal connection. ​This is why, when he tells me that he falls in love with the people he photographs in a really intimate way, I believe him. Rankin loves people. His humanism stands before his art, and in the images of models in Unfashionable ​we see it come across as their empowerment. They are not represented as accessories to an image; they are given the same power, the same authority as his celebrity portrait sitters. If there is one phrase I would use to describe the attitude inherent in a classic Rankin portrait, it would be ‘positive defiance’.

If for David Bailey there is a definite interrelationship between portraiture and fashion, for Rankin there might be little if any distinction at all. Just looking at the images of this new generation of Insta-girls–Bella, Gigi–they are the only credit in the fashion photograph that really matters to Rankin.

Rankin is not only a mythologist of others; he is also a great self-mythologist. Most people don’t know his birth name is John Rankin Waddell. Maybe the Queen called him John, or maybe she called him Rankin, we’ll never know, but Rankin by its very intensity as a name, by its very Scottish medieval ancestry, comes with a portent of power, title, position, status. And while Rankin himself had none of these, he had the working-class defiance and the cocksure sense of his own skill as a photographer that he was always going to do exactly as he wanted.

We flip through history in reverse and at the end of the book we find where it all started in the mid-1980s. We see Rankin in a nude self-portrait, sitting in a studio surrounded with the collected assemblage of his interests in fashion, sex and magazine culture. A classic school portrait is front and centre, just behind it his parents’ wedding photograph, a copy of ​Vogue magazine alongside Susan Sontag’s critical text ​On Photography​. The word ​sex ​is hand-written on tape stuck to his bare chest. It represents the entire semiotics of what is to come, and it’s through these twin images that we can see so much of what informed Rankin’s approach to photography: the creation of persona and identity through mythmaking, his deconstruction/reconstruction of photography as a medium, and finally the deep humanism, shown through the inclusion in his work of friends, collaborators and his parents (after whom he has named his current studio in Kentish Town, Annroy).

Rankin’s portrait of me is one of my favourite documents of our relationship. ​Every photograph is a transference of energy and power, every person in the photographer’s gaze a subject that he moulds to his own reality. In that moment of beatitude he captured the tenderness of our love and trust–something unspoken, unacknowledged between us even today. ​Unfashionable to me reads as an essay on otherness, bringing to light what we don’t see, what others invariably fail to see, but what Rankin sees. It’s an emotional connection to people that is beyond language, but–thankfully for us holding this book–not beyond photography.