Pure: Rankin

Working with In the Pink gallery for the first time, PURE: RANKIN is a distillation of internationally renowned photographer, Rankin, and his approach to creating work. An interplay between light and dark, life and death; the works on display create a conversation through aesthetics.

Curated to showcase Rankin’s work and vision in its purest form, the works on display are not the conspicuously clean shots of social media or advertising, rather an exploration of personality, performance and, in many cases, natural imperfection.

Rankin says: “This exhibition is a fresh realisation with my fascination with life and death, and the real vs. the unreal. These are themes which have fascinated me most throughout my career.

As I get older, all these ideas become more intertwined in my imagination. They are not mutually exclusive to me, and I am able to find one within another.

To showcase my new floral works alongside archival beauty and portraiture is to draw a line in theme and intent. I always strive to find the reality in beauty. The real person behind any image I take. This is the purest my photography can be.”

Rankin co-founded the seminal magazine Dazed & Confused with Jefferson Hack in 1991 and has since published the likes of AnOther and AnOther Man, alongside over 40 books and the biannual fashion, culture and lifestyle print and digital platform, Hunger.

His photography has been published everywhere from his own publications to Elle, Vogue, Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Wonderland, and exhibited in galleries around the world, including MoMA, New York, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

He lives in London with his wife Tuuli and their dogs.