Rankin turns into a cruise-ship photographer

John Waddell – the photographer higher often known as Rankin – had by no means been on a cruise earlier than, till he shot the singer Nicole Scherzinger for the launch of a brand new P&O Cruises ship. The expertise – of the crusing – left an impression, and some conversations with P&O administration later, Rankin was commissioned to shoot the crew and just some of the 5,200 passengers of its 184,700 tonne liner M/S Arvia. The transient? To counter the stereotype that cruising is predominantly the vacation selection of retirees.

‘I attempted to be open-minded,’ says Rankin of the seven-day cruise across the coasts of Spain and France. ‘Friends had mentioned to me, “You don’t want to go on a cruise”, and once I requested how they’d discovered it, after all, they’d by no means been on one. Cruises get a nasty rap that places folks off attempting one. My expertise is that the presumptions folks have about cruise holidays are typically means off.’

Rankin – whose 50 portraits, edited from a collection of some 150, will go on free public show at Battersea Power Station, London, from 17 September 2025 – could properly say this of his consumer, after all, however nonetheless, tempers his enthusiasm.

‘There’s a type of nostalgia and a glamour to cruising – getting dressed up for the ship’s finest eating places – however then additionally one thing down-to-earth – going to pub quiz,’ he says of a potpourri replete with photographic potential. ‘Not everybody likes that blend. Since the ship is sort of a small city, it’s a really combined group of individuals too, one embracing an all-in-it-together perspective – no one goes to look down their nostril at you – which additionally isn’t for everybody.

‘It’s not simply the chance to discover locations you may in any other case by no means go,’ he provides, ‘it’s an actual chuckle too. Normally, it’s laborious to solid members of the general public [for a shoot], however right here the thought of being approached to have their portrait shot was simply one other surprising expertise of a form typical of being on a cruise-liner. That’s the spirit that I’ve tried to seize in these footage.’

While Rankin concedes that Martin Parr would seemingly have provide you with a really completely different outcome – ‘I’m probably not a documentary photographer,’ he notes – every shoot took simply 10-Quarter-hour, in order to not disrupt holidaymakers an excessive amount of. The footage – some akin to style photographs, some extra intimate, others wilfully foolish – have been taken across the clock and embraced some spontaneous concepts. One of the ship’s dancers dressed up as a lifeguard and leapt within the air, for instance, whereas the actor Layton Williams – one in all P&O’s model ambassadors, alongside chef Marco Pierre White and Blur’s Alex James – donned a pink swimsuit and lay casually within the pool.