Alison Jackson: Images

Alison Jackson produces incredibly voyeuristic satiristic photos that portray the imagined secret lives of the rich and famous, through the pre-arranged nature of the images, always including celebrity doubles as replacements for the real stars, prompting us to question at first, is this really what Diana's doing? Jackson taps in to our curiosity towards the celebrity status, opening us up to a world some might desire to see what some are like behind closed doors, often involving embarrassing acts that would otherwise devastate the subject be it shown in a media situation.

Alison's photos are often shot as I said, in a voyeuristic fashion, but use the idea of the peeping tom and the privacy invading paparazzi as a frame for each image. This kind of stretching of the truth and make believe is the opposite to that I desire in my own work, but this research encapsulates the basic view of the audience, to imagine someone not based on who they are but what we want them to be.

Tony Blair himself has been the target of much of Jackson's work (often also including viral videos), along with these images, the sort you might find in The Sun or Hello! magazine. It may seem that Jackson enlarges the idea of ridiculing (maybe not intentionally), but in doing so we see these photos much in the same way we might watch a Spitting Image sketch (see previous blog post) or read a political cartoon in The Guardian.

 

The above scene is a nod to Brokeback Mountain and highlights what we'd like to imagine to be a very close relationship between Blair and Bush, to the extent that they are romantically engaged. The rope joining them screams as a metaphor for this, as the over exposure of the photo gives it a real amateur feel that adds to the authenticity of it being covert.

Another scene, similiar to the other but highlighting more blatant sexual innuendos. These photos are almost physical ennactments of the cartoons and characatures that we see, feeding this strange idea that we have about blur and making it a photographic reality.

This is what

http://www.alisonjackson.com/photos.html