WTF is Rankin’s gravestone picture about?

You’ve probably heard about FAIK by now — or spotted the preview of it in Issue 34 of HUNGER. But if you haven’t, FAIK is a brand new magazine created by our very own editor-in-chief Rankin, that’s (pretty much) entirely made up of AI photography and interviews. Scary. But that’s the whole point. It’s meant to be ironic. As a photographer and magazine editor, Rankin is holding up a mirror to the creative industries and making people think about how they’re using AI, so that it doesn’t take our jobs. Or take over the world. 

The gravestone image is the pièce de résistance of this concept. With an epitaph reading ‘Photography (1826-2025), killed by AI’, the headstone is a provocative statement about the death of creativity. If you take a trip to Rankin’s studio until the end of this week, you’ll see an installation of the image front and centre, heading up an anti-exhibition of all the Midjourney-generated images in FAIK, like a portal into a twisted future. While it’s a future that most people hope won’t actualise, FAIK Off and Rankin’s notorious gravestone image have gotten people talking. 

Food for thought

When Rankin first dropped the gravestone image on Instagram back in April, it racked up tens of thousands of likes, while the corresponding LinkedIn post garnered hundreds of comments. Some people were scared. Some were pissed off. Some people thought it was a bit extreme, like the one guy who wrote, “AI hasn’t killed photography any more than photography killed painting; it’s simply challenging us to redefine what we value about the medium”. Overall, the image was deemed to be an intentionally hyperbolic statement about the direction the creative industry is moving in — a purposely “grave epitaph” as one user commented (very clever). Either way, it got people thinking. 

In the words of Doechii — Anxiety

We’ve established that the grave image is intentionally OTT, but most creatives will admit that it taps into some very real anxieties about the industry. And if Rankin, who’s snapped everyone from the Queen to the Spice Girls, is worried about it, it probably means that we all should be, too. 

Cheap thrills

The FAIK project isn’t just meant to be scary, though. Rankin has described it as “exciting, dirty and terrifying”. While one downside of using AI to create syntho-graphs (that’s what Rankin calls AI-generated photos) is the lack of human touch, the limitless possibilities that Midjourney affords is pretty exhilarating. But given the way AI pretty much steals images from the internet, Rankin as much as anyone will admit that it’s a cheap thrill.

I’m a metaphor, duh

Apparently, some people thought that Rankin had died when the gravestone image dropped. Aside from the fact that no-one in their right mind would log onto a dead person’s Instagram account and post a picture of their tombstone, it’s an interesting segue into how industry big-dogs like Rankin are embracing or rejecting AI. For our editor-in-chief, it’s a bit of both. FAIK isn’t a love letter to AI or hate mail, it’s both.

FAIK Off is taking place at Annroy, 110–114 Grafton Road, London, NW5 4BA until 18 May (open from 12-7pm daily).