Alison Jackson: Confidential

by Alison Jackson (photographs), Will Self (Contributor), Charles Glass (Contributor)

Alison Jackson has photographed the Queen of England on the toilet, George Bush and Tony Blair chatting in the sauna, Osama Bin Laden playing backgammon, and Monica Lewinsky lighting Bill Clinton's cigar. Or has she? The likenesses are uncanny, but of course, her subjects are look-alikes. Her photos demonstrate that while seeing is believing, the truth is another story entirely. In her work, Jackson says, ?Likeness becomes real and fantasy touches on the believable. The viewer is suspended in disbelief. I try to highlight the psychological relationship between what we see and what we imagine. This is bound up in our need to look?our voyeurism?and our need to believe.? Indeed, by showing ?celebrities? ostensibly caught unawares, Jackson's pictures show us what we imagine might go on behind closed doors. Her work has caused controversy, not least because it treads in a very gray area between parody and realism by seeming to break down the carefully fortified private lives of public figures. For this edition, Jackson has been commissioned to shoot a broad selection of new portraits of dead-ringers for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Saddam Hussein, George Bush and Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump, J Lo, Eminem, Britney Spears, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, and many more. Expect the unexpected! The photographer: After studying fine art photography at London's Royal College of Art, Alison Jackson shocked the world with her award-winning BBC TV series, ?Double Take.? She has exhibited her artwork in contemporary art galleries and museums throughout Europe and North America, and also works in the medium of masscommunication, via films, advertising, television, and books.

Genres: Art

264 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 2007

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alison Jackson's work (depicting celebrity look-a-likes) is wry, bitter, and satirical. These photos, with their oh-so-similar faces, mock not only their true-life doppelgangers but also our celebrity-obsessed culture--all the while carrying on a deeper criticism of authenticity and simulacra. Celebrities lives are carefully constructed, at least the portion of their lives that are fed to (or stolen by) the media, and Jackson's photos, with their sometimes absurd, sometimes banal, but always apropos tableaus very much destruct the predictable, static comprehension we have of this strange class of people.

[Doc Pastor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alison Jackson: confidential. El equívoco está servido. La fotógrafa juega con la verdad y la ficción para crear su propia realidad.