Words matter. These are the best Alison Jackson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Career-wise, I feel very lucky to have always been able to follow my creative path.
A lot of people who look at my photographs think it is an easy joke, but it does take a bit of thinking about.
I can’t remember exactly how old I was when my parents gave me my first camera, but it was a Canon, and I was certainly far too young to have such a good camera.
I’m a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.
I had a very outdoorsy childhood. I was athletic and used to ride and do dressage. I could ride almost before I could walk. There is a picture of me at 18 months old sitting happily on the back of a donkey.
You can watch a little bit of war from your nice living room – 30 seconds of what’s going on in Syria – and when you’ve had enough, switch over to some celebrity programme. We live our life through screens and images in this way, and we don’t know what is real or fake anymore. It doesn’t matter.
Of course, my own political beliefs inform the ideas I come up with.
When I am preparing my ‘lookalike’ photographs, I think about the character of the real people, because, if the photographs are going to be plausible, you have to convince the viewer that they could have happened.
Finding the perfect lookalike to work with is crucial and a lengthy process. We have our regulars, but we also use social media all the time to find people. It’s amazing who you can unearth on Twitter.
I think privacy is important, and it’s important you don’t bore people with your own boring self.
I’m not satirical in a traditional way. What I do is more about creating caricatures and cartoons. I am commentating on the nature of how we live through photography, and how you can twist an angle to create a different perception of a person.
When Princess Diana died, I couldn’t understand why people were mourning her death in such an enormous, hysterical way when they didn’t actually know her for real.
I don’t really like using ridicule as a form of humor.
I suppose we carry photographs now, but I think it’s rather wonderful that people used to carry drawings and watercolours. I wish people did that more often.
Photography can be a deceitful, superficial medium that leads us into believing something even though we know it’s not necessarily true. It lulls us into a false sense of complacency.
I’m particularly interested in how you can’t rely on your own perception.
If you see everything through the lens, you are constantly composing pictures. I think in pictures; I don’t think in text.
The only people I really hate are parking attendants.
It’s always fun to put fake celebrities in unlikely situations, but somehow it’s even more fun when politicians are involved.
I go up to people and ask if I can use them in my photos. Occasionally it is the person in question, as happened with James Hewitt. How embarrassing. He just laughed and said, ‘You can’t afford me.’
Art work is inconclusive. It opens your mind up. At least, that’s what I hope it does. And advertising, using exactly the same photograph, closes things down. It makes it conclusive. It sells a product, and that is its primary function.
Photography seduces us into thinking we can believe photographs, whereas we can’t really believe that a picture can tell us any kind of truth at all.
