As his new exhibition, Back in the Dazed, opens at 180 Studios, the photographer and Dazed co-founder shares memories and advice from across his star-studded career
If you picture a leading figure from the cutting-edge creative scene of the UK in the 90s, it’s pretty likely that you see them through Rankin’s lens. The photographer and co-founder of Dazed had a front-row seat to the parties, clubs, and shows that gave the era its lasting reputation, and the portraits in his archive – from musical icons, to supermodels, to cult celebrities – is a testament to that fact. Now, you can see it for yourself, courtesy of the new exhibition Back In the Dazed at 180 Studios.
Opening this week at 180 Strand, the show features photos created from 1991 to 2001, a formative period in Rankin’s life and career, marked by the inauguration of Dazed alongside co-founder Jefferson Hack and the blossoming of a broader creative community. Coming into the 90s, though, Rankin thought of himself as an outsider. “I was from nowhere,” he says. “And I thought of myself as a bit of a blank canvas, because [there was] nothing in my background that would have made people think I would be anything in the creative world at all.” This would quickly change.
At the time Dazed was founded in 1991, Rankin’s collaborators were just his mates. “None of us had ever done a magazine before,” he says. “We were all pretty new to it. I think [the] energy was really optimistic, very excited, quite DIY.” Early influences included Malcolm McLaren and Andy Warhol. By the mid-90s, Rankin was shooting with the likes of David Bowie, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, PJ Harvey, and Björk. The latter, he says: “Was a kind of seminal moment in my career.” Alongside his own shoots, the magazine was also reaching new heights, like the September 1998 issue, Fashion-Able, guest edited by Alexander McQueen with a cover shot by Nick Knight.
“I can’t underestimate how we didn’t think we were going to be talked about,” Rankin says of starting out. “There was an ambition to be talked about, but that doesn’t mean that we really believed that we would be.” Instead, the guiding force during the “challenging” early half of the 90s was to pursue collaborations that felt “organic and natural”.
Often, this took a nonconformist slant, from the Snog series (2000), styled by Alister Mackie, which played with contemporary ideas about intimacy, gender and sexuality, to a 1994 Dazed cover that depicted a girl weeping. “[That cover] came from our distributor saying, ‘You have to have a beautiful girl smiling with blue eyes,’” he adds, “and us going, ‘No we don’t, that’s bollocks.’” The ultimate goal? To create culture, as much as reporting on it.
All the while, of course, Rankin was developing his personal style as a photographer. (And still is. “You need to keep learning,” he says. “I’m still learning stuff after all these years. I’m very inquisitive about photography. I love the whole medium.”) “I knew that I wanted to do conceptual art photography, but I just felt that audience was so narrow, so I combined that with fashion and brought two things together,” he says. In that sense, he treated Dazed as a kind of “wolf in sheep’s clothing” – a bundle of ideas about art and culture, masquerading as a more straightforward and “seductive” style magazine.
“Then with portraiture, I just really loved people,” he says. This love has seen him shoot everyone from Britpop bands to the Queen, over the years, and early on he decided that each portrait should be a collaborative process. “I never really understood this idea of a transaction between the photographer and the person you’re shooting,” he explains. “My photography was always based on making something, not taking something.”
“Making something, not taking something,” is a good mantra to keep in mind, but even more important advice for young photographers starting out on their own path, Rankin suggests, is to develop a deeper critical understanding of photography as an art form.
“All the photographers I love have a very broad knowledge of photography, Richard Avedon, or Annie Leibovitz, people I admired when I was coming through, and even the young photographers that came along as I was starting, like Corinne Day and Juergen Teller,” he says. “Whereas this idea of a camera as [being] just an extension of your thoughts or feelings, that’s too easy. So I’d always recommend that people go back and do their homework.” Looking back through Rankin’s 90s archive in 2024, it feels fairly safe to say that he’s secured a spot on the syllabus himself.
Back in the Dazed is on show at 180 Studios until June 23.
