John Rankin Waddell, travaillant sous le nom de Rankin est un portraitiste et photographe de mode anglais.
En 1991, il crée avec Jefferson Hack le magazine Dazed & Confused. En 2000, il lance son magazine Rank. Son travail a inspiré des publicitaires. Il a fait des photos pour Zink, Citizen K, Arena, BMW, Hugo Boss, Nokia.
À propos de Björk
What were your first jobs in photography, and how did you get them ? You mentioned you did a lot of look books.
I was very lucky, because one of my first shoots was a press session for Björk. For her record label, One Little Indian. Once I’d got that, it was very quick for me to get other work as a portrait photographer. Back then, the music industry had a lot of money. Another of my very first shoots was Kylie Minogue’s album cover. I did that in ’93 and ’94. Then I did the Spice Girls in ’96. I remember that was the biggest wage that I’d ever earned from a shoot.
[At Dazed & Confused,] we got some great gigs really early on. That was where my career started. I remember, with Björk, I was shooting her, and I was doing my own thing, and I was so nervous about the shoot that I was doing rip-offs of a couple of other photographers.
In a way, she made me realize you’ve got to believe your own voice, because she really moved away from the stuff that was derivative into the stuff that was more about me. That was a really amazing thing. To have someone so successful at that time give you the confidence to do something that was very much your own, as opposed to copying someone else, which was almost like a safety blanket for me.
Also, the team around me — my contemporaries at Dazed & Confused, like Jefferson [Hack] and Katie Grand and Katy England — even though there were a lot of arguments and fights, they all gave us the confidence to do what we thought was the right thing to do, and not copy other people. I was very, very lucky.When did people start taking it seriously ?
People like Björk took it seriously. That was very encouraging for us very early on. We went into brands and sold this idea of this magazine. Then people started knocking on our door. It was really amazing how many people [came to] that office and wanted to work with us. We saw a lot of people that have become incredibly successful.fashionista.com
