Rankin: An image maker at the cutting edge of fashion

"At 50, everyone has the face he deserves," wrote George Orwell in his 1949 notebook. But did Tony Blair, for all the ambiguities of his current position, really deserve the face he was given on the cover of last week's Financial Times magazine? Gaunt, deranged, apparently aghast at the cruelty of fate, he looked like a torture victim deprived of sleep for five days, then forced to wear a tight-fitting shirt and cruelly jaunty tie. The camera's "ring-flash" technique stamped two tiny Polo mints on his eyeballs. The receding hairline, the swooping lines on forehead and cheeks, a suggestion of liver spots about the cranium – it didn't seem a very celebratory portrait to mark the PM's 50th birthday. Then you noticed the cover line that accompanied the image: "The Believer". All was suddenly clear. This deeply troubled, terminally worried-looking man wasn't a victim after all, but something more spiritual – he was a martyr.

Private Eye was merciless about the pong of sanctity that hung over the photo shoot. It printed another of the images – this time, with the PM's eyes cast moodily downwards, his forehead bleached an unearthly white, one hand covering his breast in a silent mea culpa – and added the rubric: "Prayer Aid. This thoughtful portrait of the vicar has helped countless parishioners through their problems and some even claimed it has miraculous healing powers..." It was, newspapers agreed, the most egregiously self-conscious piece of image-making ever visited on a serving prime minister. And who was the photographer called on to give Mr Blair some soulful gravitas? Why, the most hip iconographer in the land: Rankin.

Who he? Rankin is the most celebrated snapper of his generation, the emperor of a thousand images of fame, many of them ravaged, anguished, distorted, over-maquillaged faces, all in flight from the ordinary. You'll have seen his work all over the place. His photographs of pop stars are masterpieces of attitude – Kylie Minogue lying naked on a white floor, Richard Ashcroft pouting over his naked shoulder, Goldie raging with a mouthful of gold teeth, Debbie Harry weirdly alien with a knotted scarf and downcast eyes. His pictures of dogs dressed up in Agent Provocateur-style lingerie filled the windows of Selfridges last Christmas and stopped the seasonal passing trade in its tracks. His portraits of Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Kylie, Leonardo DiCaprio and the Spice Girls defined the 1990s Zeitgeist with a certainty that hasn't been seen since the monochrome shots of The Beatles, the Kray twins and Michael Caine in the 1960s. Then it was David Bailey who made a starry career out of creating stars or confirming their celebrity. Now Rankin performs the same service and reaps the same benefits.

Rankin and Bailey are a hot double act right now. A joint exhibition of their work has just opened at the fashionable Proud Gallery in Camden Town, London. It's entitled Rankin Up, Bailey Down Under and features contrasting approaches to female sexuality: Bailey's pictures are close-up shots of pudenda, more gynaecological than pornographic, while Rankin's display girls on top – looming over the photographer, ecstatic, absorbed, pained, abstracted, self-pleasuring. "They go very well together, I think," said Alex Proud, the gallery's owner. "Bailey is completely direct about his subject matter. Rankin's are much more soft and pastelly. They're in colour; they're more fashion-world, and they're very sexy."

Soft? Pastel? Fashion? It seems a far cry from the cover of the FT magazine. But therein lies one of the many paradoxes about John Rankin Waddell: his constant struggle to elude definition as a snapper of the famous and beautiful, even as his reputation insists that that's exactly what he is. Celebrity photographers may start out as brutal realists, but they tend to end up as courtiers of their subjects, like Rankin's arch-rival, Mario Testino. Rankin does not envy Testino's global réclame. "I do photograph women who are beautiful, but I always try to give it an edge," he says in his spectacularly fake Cockney drawl. "I can't just do the glamorous thing. It does my head in. If you're not trying to twist it, what are you doing?" Hence his excursions into stark portraiture, of the kind visited on the PM.

He was born in Paisley in 1966, where his father was British sales director for a leading oil company. "My mum and dad were working-class Glaswegians made good, so I didn't have an artistic background," he told a newspaper. "There weren't any art books in the house. I had to plead with my parents to buy a record player. I was a bit of a late developer."

Expelled from school, he studied accountancy at Brighton Polytechnic but decided it couldn't possibly occupy his life. So he left, went to live in Peckham, south London, and study photography at the London College of Printing. There he met a fellow student called Jefferson Hack, with whom, at 25, he founded the fashion 'n' music glossy magazine Dazed and Confused, assisted by a start-up loan of £50,000 from Rankin Snr.

It became quite the trendiest magazine on the shelves, the epitome of cool. Jefferson Hack, who later achieved fame as the father of Kate Moss's baby, interviewed the stellar names of the moment, while Rankin captured them energetically gurning for the camera. He would sometimes commission shoots that featured amputees, overweight omen, models weeping, models devouring chocolate or licking the blade of knives. In his portraits, said Madonna (who refused to be snapped by anyone else for the cover of Q magazine), "people look like they're having fun with him". In front of Rankin's lens, Cate Blanchett dissolves into giggles; Damien Hirst flings his bald head back like a convict in ecstasy; Björk peeps out from an explosion of black hair; Helena Christiansen poses gleamingly naked except for a bar-code.

While still artistic director of Dazed & Confused (and invariably responsible for the cover image), he started up a publishing company called Vision On, with Alex Proud. Inevitably, his first book was a collection of his own portraits, Nudes. Unusually, it featured naked members of the public alongside professional models: women who had answered an advert placed in The Big Issue, asking for "nude models: all ages, all sizes, for photographic exhibition". Hundreds of women applied, not suspecting their flesh would be immortalised by the trendiest lensman in the UK.

He followed up Nudes a year later with Male Nudes, which drew a surprisingly shocked response. "Why are people so scared of willies?" asked the photographer. In CeleBritation, he put together a collection of out-takes from PR sessions. In Breeding: A Study in Transition he concentrated on androgynous female nudes. In sofasosexy, a bold new experiment, he snapped several naked women lying on sofas.

In 1996, he married the actress Kate Hardie, with whom he had a son, Lyle, but the couple recently divorced. "You get to 30," he mused, "get married and have a kid, and you're just a bit angry, aren't you?"

And to many people, he's a little too angry to be comfortable with. Stories abound of Rankin's allegedly filthy temper, his bawling-out of his staff, his savagery to complete strangers, his boorishness, his drinking. They tend to be countered by alternative tales of his generosity and good-humoured raillery.

"I think he is genuinely confusing," says Alex Proud. "All the stuff you read in the papers is contradictory but true. I know him to be an exceptionally generous man, but, like all people with a huge creative drive, he can feel frustrated when those around him don't get it."

Proud tells the story of how, on the eve of the new show, he got a call from Rankin, who'd clearly had a few glasses of wine. "By the way," said the photographer, apropos of nothing, "the guy who's hanging my pictures, he'd better make a good job of it or I'll fucking kill 'im." Proud told him not to be ridiculous, that his curator was experienced and was probably working through the night to get the pictures absolutely right. "And it turned out that, later, during the night, Rankin went round to the gallery, effing and blinding and shouting, 'This show had better look great or I'll fucking kill yer'." But Proud is keen to point out that, at the opening, Rankin was the first to congratulate the curator on a fantastic job.

Short, pugnacious, straight shooting and highly sexed, Rankin is a bit of a Mick Hucknall when it comes to "arm candy" and celebrity girlfriends. In this regard, like many others, he takes his cue from David Bailey. "Plenty of guys use photography to get laid – and it works, no doubt about it," he says. "I admit that through this job I've had tons of sex, and I'm sure Bailey would say the same. But my last three books all featured nudes and I didn't sleep with any of them." He admits to falling in love with his subjects. "You have to, otherwise there's no emotion. When somebody walks into my studio, man or woman, I'm fascinated and excited by them and want to know all about them. I don't use photography as some sort of power trip. I just enjoy the process."

It's difficult to know where this workaholic image-maker can go next. After the nudes, the male nudes, the in-between nudes, the nudes on sofas, and the nudes on top, he may have to start experimenting with the partly clothed. Now that nudes have started turning up at Saatchi parties, they're just too passé to interest this achingly trendy man.

His portrait-taking has climbed an upward trajectory from Kate to Kylie to Madonna to the Queen (whom he snapped for her Golden Jubilee; he said he had fun air-brushing her wrinkles) to Tony Blair, but what challenge lies beyond the PM?

This shrewd businessman, and a talented myth-maker, this Scottish Cockney who cannot quite commit to either art or ephemera, this dealer in the surfaces of a notably superficial decade might, some say, sign up with a large corporation to be their image-maker. But perhaps not yet, while he possesses the gift of profound nosiness. "It's great to shoot some interesting people in their own backyards," he says. "I like the directness of it. I'm driven by curiosity. I just love meeting new people."

LIFE STORY

Born John Rankin Waddell, in 1966, in Glasgow

Family Divorced from actress Kate Hardie; they have a six-year-old son, Lyle

Education Expelled from school. Dropped out of an accountancy course at Brighton Polytechnic to study photography at London College of Printing

Career Worked as a cleaner to make ends meet while studying photography. Co-founded Dazed & Confused magazine in 1991 with Jefferson Hack. He has photographed Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Kylie Minogue, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Spice Girls, Cate Blanchett, Damien Hirst, Helena Christiansen, The Queen, the Prime Minister...

Books The Nude Photography of Rankin: Models Wanted Any Age, Any Size; Male Nudes; In Breeding: A Study in Transition; sofasosexy; Rankin Works (edited by Liz Farrelly)

He says "I don't think photographers like me in general. I stopped caring a long time ago when I obviously got no respect from people. I just do things that make me laugh. I bought a Ferrari to wind people up. I never drive it."

They say "He was like this weed who just popped up overnight. He's a scallywag and I see a bit of the young me in him." David Bailey