‘I tried to be open-minded’: is Rankin a natural cruise-ship photographer?

John Waddell – the photographer better known as Rankin – had never been on a cruise before, until he shot the singer Nicole Scherzinger for the launch of a new P&O Cruises ship. The experience – of the sailing – left an impression, and a few conversations with P&O management later, Rankin was commissioned to shoot the crew and just a few of the 5,200 passengers of its 184,700 tonne liner M/S Arvia. The brief? To counter the stereotype that cruising is predominantly the holiday choice of retirees.

'I tried to be open-minded,' says Rankin of the seven-day cruise around the coasts of Spain and France. 'Friends had said to me, “You don’t want to go on a cruise”, and when I asked how they’d found it, of course, they’d never been on one. Cruises get a bad rap that puts people off trying one. My experience is that the presumptions people have about cruise holidays tend to be way off.'

Rankin – whose 50 portraits, edited from a selection of some 150, will go on free public display at Battersea Power Station, London, from 17 September 2025 – may well say this of his client, of course, but nonetheless, tempers his enthusiasm.

'There’s a kind of nostalgia and a glamour to cruising – getting dressed up for the ship’s best restaurants – but then also something down-to-earth – going to pub quiz,' he says of a potpourri replete with photographic potential. 'Not everyone likes that mix. Since the ship is like a small town, it’s a very mixed group of people too, one embracing an all-in-it-together attitude – nobody is going to look down their nose at you – which also isn’t for everyone.

'It’s not just the opportunity to explore places you might otherwise never go,' he adds, 'it’s a real laugh too. Normally, it’s hard to cast members of the public [for a shoot], but here the idea of being approached to have their portrait shot was just another unexpected experience of a kind typical of being on a cruise-liner. That’s the spirit that I’ve tried to capture in these pictures.'

While Rankin concedes that Martin Parr would likely have come up with a very different result – 'I’m not really a documentary photographer,' he notes – each shoot took just 10-15 minutes, so as not to disrupt holidaymakers too much. The pictures – some akin to fashion shots, some more intimate, others wilfully silly – were taken around the clock and embraced some spontaneous ideas. One of the ship’s dancers dressed up as a lifeguard and leapt in the air, for example, while the actor Layton Williams – one of P&O’s brand ambassadors, alongside chef Marco Pierre White and Blur’s Alex James – donned a pink suit and lay casually in the pool.

‘There was this woman in there trying to do her lengths, asking him to get out of the way,' Rankin recalls. 'But that’s one of the strange [otherworldly] things about being on a cruise ship: nobody bats an eyelid if you get into a pool wearing a suit.'

A selection of Rankin's photographs will be at Battersea Power Station, London, from 17 September 2025, batterseapowerstation.co.uk