Lindsay Lohan and me, I never thought we’d be in competition. Here I am, though, in a studio in Islington, with Rankin, the photographer.

“I shot her the other day,” he’s telling me, taking a pull on his mid-shoot beer. “Amazing. So rock and roll. Unbelievably… decadent. Unbelievably. She exudes it. It was like I was shooting Gisele, or Kate Moss. Everything was totally… amazing and fast. I was almost struggling to keep up with her.”

Wow, I say, but inside I’m seething. Because the next person that Rankin will be shooting, in just the same way, will be me. I don’t want to be worse than Lindsay Lohan. Suddenly, this feels very important to me. I want to be rock and roll, too.

Okay, so our shoot may be slightly shorter. Probably, it will last somewhere between five and fifteen minutes. I’d love to be able to say I’m here because Vogue has decided to do a glam-chic cover story on Britain’s top 11 whimsical lifestyle journalists, but alas, no. In fact, it’s because Rankin is midway through a project called Rankin Live!, for which he intends to shoot 1,000 members of the British public. One of them, in about half an hour, will be me.

Shooting the public, says Rankin, is less like shooting models, and more like shooting film stars. Well. Film stars other than Lindsay Lohan. “Most people need quite a lot of direction,” he says. “Most people don’t like it. That’s the funny thing about photography. They look at celebrities in magazines, and they think, oh, they love it. But actually they f****** hate it. Especially actors. Because it’s them, you know?”

Since he co-founded Dazed & Confused with Jefferson Hack back in 1992, Rankin has shot everybody from Britney and Kylie to Tony Blair and the Queen. Here, on the walls, there are huge pictures of Kate Moss and David Bowie, but also of people you don’t know. Hundreds of them. The naked pregnant woman, the man with the dog on his shoulder, the guy dressed like a latex Nazi. A subject is a subject, is the point. We are just like them.

When at work, Rankin slouches around, shoeless and in skinny jeans; builder’s bum all over the place. He stopped wearing trainers, he says, in his mid-thirties, about the same sort of time he started feeling that he had to move out of Hoxton. At 43, he’s the oldest person on set and also the shortest, although that says more about everybody else. Almost all of Rankin’s staff, male or female, could be models. They rush around, wielding clipboards or stands, or hefting lights and reflecty things. Many of them sit at enormous computer screens. It’s like Battlestar Galactica in here. On one huge canvas with a projector, you can see whatever the camera sees in real time. It’s Rankin, live.

“Great hair,” says Lara, the hairdresser, and gives mine a tug. Hairdressers often say this, because I have exactly the kind of hair that hairdressers, and only hairdressers, would love. “Shall we make it really big?” whispers Lara, conspiratorially. “Sure,” I say, because I reckon that’s what Lindsay Lohan would do. The end result is a sort of rock-star Margaret Thatcher.

I quite like it. Then a make-up artist called Emma daubs me with moisturiser, primer, a light base of foundation, some under-eye concealer, and Vaseline around the lips. “You’re very low-maintenance,” she says.

All this, with a thousand people. It’s a hell of an undertaking. Today Rankin will do about 50. In total, so far, he’s on about 400 or so. The bulk of the rest will be done when the show goes public, in a huge space at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in London. At that point, the whole thing becomes performative. Rankin himself likens it to a peek behind the curtain. “This is what you do!” he says. “This is how you make famous people look great!”

Some people complain. “There have been a few who seem to think I’m a magician. ‘Why don’t I look like Brad Pitt?’ Well, you don’t look like Brad Pitt. What else can you say?”

It’s a more varied bunch of people here than you might expect. A few wannabe models, sure, but others, too. “Diversity is great. I don’t see the point of it just being for 5,000 people in Hoxton. I want to be on billboards. Other photographers say, oh he’s too into PR, all that. But what’s the point of being creative, unless you are reaching a large audience?”

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