British photographer Rankin tried to make The Queen pose with a sword for her Golden Jubilee in 2002. However, she resisted.
British photographer John Rankin Waddell, who has collaborated with Madonna, David Bowie, and Kate Moss, spoke of his encounter with the late Queen Elizabeth II and claimed that the moment she entered the room, a “wave of empowerment” washed over the audience. However, the late monarch did not like to be photographed in a particular way.
Rankin tried to make The Queen pose with a sword for her Golden Jubilee in 2002. However, she resisted. She said she didn’t like her hands to be photographed. When the celebrity photographer insisted that he really wanted to photograph her holding the sword’, she said, ‘I don’t like my hands.’
She resisted it, but Rankin was later contacted by Buckingham Palace to let him know that the photo he had taken of her was one of their favorites because she was smiling a lot. Rankin claimed to have received a truly remarkable email from the curator that the photograph of her was one of their favorites.
Since she opted to wear gloves while performing her royal duties, Queen Elizabeth’s hands were almost never visible. The Queen’s glove maker since the 1940s, Cornelia James, previously claimed that the accessory was a part of her style and that people’s mental images of the monarch included her waving white gloves.
The thing Rankin loved about The Queen, he said, was that she was so smart and everything in response that she was saying had an amazing twist to it. He admitted that he probably shouldn’t have said that she disliked her hands.
Prior to the shoot, Rankin saw the Queen and a footman laughing and joking, and he said he wanted to capture that in his image. He continued by saying that he was in the throne chamber and that he could see her and the footman coming along this passage while they were both laughing heartily. Rankin wanted to photograph that laughter.
He also revealed the Queen poked fun at him while he took her portrait, she brought a “wave of power” into the room with her, and that he was “tongue-tied” after meeting her.