Rankin: The man who shot the Queen

And Madonna, with a scowl on her face. He makes the beautiful look ordinary and the ordinary beautiful, and now the fashion photographer who undermines fashion has made a film. By Stuart Husband

Rankin is a world-class fidgeter. As the renowned photographer, publisher and film-maker holds court on a sofa in his east London HQ, he contorts his stocky body while almost constantly running a hand through his shock of blond hair. "I'm always in motion," he confirms. "I did a show a couple of years ago called Visually Hungry. If anything, that title underplayed the way I approach things. It should have been called Visually Ravenous."

Over the past 15 years, a torrent of images has flowed from the Rankin empire. There are his photos of the famous - Madonna, Tony Blair, the Queen; nudes and "erotica"; fashion shoots and ad campaigns for the likes of Mercedes-Benz and Dove; and Dazed & Confused, the post-style "culture" magazine he co-founded with Jefferson Hack, the former Mr Kate Moss.

Dazed formed the template for the Rankin aesthetic - taking an ad hoc, post-grunge sensibility and giving it a high-art gloss. "I'm aiming for the middle ground," he says, "between the blank beautiful glossy image and the demystifying, look-at-that-cellulite Heat image. They're both lies in their own ways, but somewhere along that spectrum might lie something quite... diverting."

Rankin's work seems to thrive on paradox. The beautiful (Kate Moss, Heidi Klum) shot so that every mole or stray hair is highlighted. The exalted de-pedestalled: Madonna scowling, Damien Hirst gurning. The classical subverted: nudes covered in fried eggs or wrapped in cling film. The "ugly" - the be-freckled or size 16 "real" women in the Dove campaign - made glamorous.

Rankin denies he's doing anything as methodical as propagating a new idea of beauty. "We retouch like everyone else, but I'm just trying to find a little bit of honesty within that lie."

His new book, Tuulitastic, is a record of his relationship with the Amazonian-framed Finnish model Tuuli. Would he say she's his... "Muse? I don't like that word. But I guess she is. I mean, I've had lots of girlfriends and I have an ex-wife [the actress Kate Hardie, by whom he has a nine-year-old son, Luke]. But I've never felt like I have with Tuuli. She's a good, kind, warm, generous, funny person. She shines from within. And that, to me, is where real beauty comes from. Through the eyes. I mean, I'm like every bloke," he adds hurriedly. "I look at the arse and breasts, yeah, but the eyes are the key."

Tuuli is one facet of a six-month series of exhibitions of Rankin's work, taking place from this month until next summer. The series will also feature celebrity Polaroids ("you can't retouch a Polaroid,"), self-portraits (mainly in drag or concealed behind a pig-mask because "I hate having my photo taken"), and a selection called Beauty-full, that promises to - yes - "question the word's definition".

By now, you'll have gathered that Rankin has no problem in the aplomb department. Even when admitting that he's taken some "pathetic, ridiculous images", he likens this to the Beatles learning their trade in Hamburg. Likewise, the only photographer he frequently name-checks is David Bailey ("Bailey always says there are too many photographers these days"). The two are friends, which is not surprising - both are from working-class backgrounds, largely self-taught, photograph the world's most beautiful people and are famous enough in their own right to be reduced to one-name sobriquets. Perhaps what's more remarkable about Rankin is that he didn't pick up a camera until he was 19.

He was born John Rankin Waddell in Glasgow 40 years ago, but there's not a trace of a Scottish accent in his flat, estuaried English. He says he had a "closeted, cotton-wooled upbringing", where art and culture were never discussed. "That's not doing my parents a disservice," he stresses. "They just weren't interested." What they did instill in him and his sister - now his manager - was self-assurance. "My dad would say that there are two types of confidence - the one that's bred in Scotland and the one that's paid for in public school."

At 18, Rankin went off to study accountancy at Brighton Polytechnic. Suddenly, he says, he was hanging out with design and fine art students who were deconstructing the patriarchal hegemony of Robert Palmer videos. "I had no idea what they were on about. But through them, and girlfriends I had, I got into fashion and art and the media."

He switched to a BA in photography. Typically, he skipped his final degree, "because I thought I was better and more capable than anyone who was ostensibly teaching me". By then, he'd met Hack, and the two worked on the London College of Printing's student magazine before starting Dazed & Confused with a loan from Rankin's father.

They lived hand-to-mouth for the first 10 years. When the big-time commissions started flowing in, "something happened to me that happens to 90 per cent of people in that position; I believed in my own hype and went out and did drugs and became a wanker."

The Rankin who came out the other side may have a mellower cast - he even talks earnestly about his charity work - but his work ethic still errs on the Protestant side. Dazed Film will soon release its first feature, the Rankin-directed The Lives of the Saints, set in the north London Turkish community and shot on the hoof in the photographer's characteristic smash-and-grab style. He is also planning new fashion and portrait commissions that, he hopes, will "maybe create little pockets of resistance to all the other images we're bombarded with. I'm still hungry," he says, giving his hair a final going-over before shooting off to his next assignment. "There's always something new to see."