Just before Christmas 2023, the renowned British photographer and director Rankin set up a small pop-up studio in London’s Carnaby Street for a RankinLIVE event.

People could turn up to sit for a cover-style Rankin portrait: an image to mark a special occasion, perhaps, such as a birthday, or wedding vows renewal, or beating cancer.

“And this amazing woman walked in called Paola Marra,” he said. “I asked what the occasion was, and she said: ‘I’m going to Dignitas.’”

The photograph was for Marra’s final social media post. “So, it was a really, really big deal,” he recalled. “It’s 11am on a Thursday morning. Just a normal day. And it was like a punch to the stomach.”

That image is now well known. In it Marra, 53, a former music industry and charity worker who had terminal bowel cancer, is giving the finger to cancer.

The picture, and the video Rankin subsequently made of Marra’s final goodbye, was released the day after her death at the Swiss clinic in March 2024.

It was a dramatic, impactful and emotional contribution to the campaign for assisted dying legislation in England and Wales, picked up by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater with her assisted dying bill, which passed the Commons only to get held up in the Lords last month, weighed down by about 1,200 amendments tabled by a handful of peers.

On Monday, Rankin, in collaboration with the campaign group Dignity in Dying, released the first of a planned series of new videos, urging MPs to “back the bill again” as backbenchers prepare to enter Thursday’s private member’s bill ballot.

One of two 60-second films, titled Time to Back the Bill Again, features a series of intimate interviews with eight people, aged 19 to 77, who are terminally ill or will ultimately reach that stage. It opens with: “Yep. I’m terminal.”

It builds into a collective appeal about end-of-life choice and democratic accountability, ending with the message: “Together, we can finish what we started. It’s time to back the bill again.”

Rankin is familiar with the subject of death: his 2013 portrait exhibition and BBC documentary Alive in the Face of Death set out to challenge British societal taboos around mortality, among other projects that have dealt with the subject.

“It’s inspiring to meet them all, because they’re all very different and have very different rationale and reasons for it,” he said of the video participants.

“But they have all got one thing in common: they don’t understand why this bill hasn’t been passed. They don’t understand why it’s been stopped.”

He said it made no sense to him that a law had been stopped that would have enabled people to “take their lives into their own hands in a responsible and dignified way”.

Dignity in Dying said new polling by Opinium had shown strong public backing for parliament seeing the bill through to its democratic conclusion.

Overall, 69% said the debate should continue until parliament reached a decision, while 61% thought the government should act to ensure MPs and peers had enough time to consider and vote on the bill so it could complete all its stages and become law.

Barbara Shooter, 69, who features in the videos, drove her husband, Adrian, 74, a former chair of Chiltern Railways, from their Oxfordshire home to Dignitas in 2022 when motor neurone disease robbed him of his mobility and speech, and compromised his ability to swallow and breathe.

“It was getting control back,” she said. “Once he knew he had a day, it was very powerful. He cheered up no end … And he had a calm, peaceful death.”

In the cruellest twist, four years later she, too, has been diagnosed with MND, affecting her mobility. She has been told hers is a slow-progression form, and she still enjoys a good quality of life. “I do have my own lines in the sand, but I’m nowhere near those,” said Shooter, who has since remarried.

She is furious at the “shocking” behaviour of the “small number of Lords” who blocked the bill, and fears the issue could fade from public consciousness.

“Who wants to face horror and pain and awfulness at the end of their life when you know you’re not going to get better? Some might be perfectly content to let nature take its course. It’s their choice. And I want my choice,” she said.

Maddie Cowey, 28, was diagnosed with ultra-rare incurable alveolar soft part sarcomas when she was 18. The London charity worker now has more than 30 sarcoma nodules across both lungs. “Without treatment I would die, basically, and it’s not going to be cured,” she said. “Making it to 10 years in itself is a huge achievement.”

She said it could “become aggressive at any time and become uncontrollable and it could happen really quickly. Or I could have decades more if they manage to keep it at bay.”

She has accepted death “probably will happen sooner for me than for most people”. “But I’ve not really accepted the fact I might suffer when I die. And not having an alternative option is really scary.

“Having the alternative of being able to choose how and when it happens would give me a lot of peace and hope.”

She said she had been “really optimistic” when Leadbeater introduced her bill. “And that’s just been taken away again and replaced with fear. I try not to dwell on it day to day because I just want to live my life, but if I let myself think about it, it’s terrifying. It feels really unfair and unjust.”

She hopes the series of videos have an impact. “Seeing the faces of the people who are asking for this, and seeing that we’re real people, I hope that that makes people realise how serious it is. And there’s no time to delay either – we don’t know how much time we have.”

Sarah Wootton, the chief executive of Dignity in Dying, said: “Every week, dying people are left with the same cruel options: suffer, travel abroad to die, or act alone.”

She added: “This is bigger than assisted dying. MPs voted for compassion. Unelected peers with their own agenda tore down our democratic principles. Parliament has unfinished business, and it’s time for MPs to return the bill to Westminster and finish what they started.”