About 20 minutes in, I realise the intensity of our verbal jousting has led
Alison Jackson and me to twirl our respective hairdos into matted birds'
nests. The 47-year-old photographer is intriguing, intelligent, infuriating
and briskly sexy (dressed in a very short skirt with killer legs, she has
the air of bossy head girl meets femme fatale). She adamantly tries to
protect her privacy while being known for those pictures and TV series
featuring lookalikes as celebrities caught (blurred, paparazzi-style) in
privacy-shattering moments: the Queen reading on the loo, Cherie Blair
getting an enema from Carole Caplin; and Jackson's first jolting image,
Diana and Dodi cuddling their lovechild.
Jackson's new set of lookalike pictures, to be exhibited in her first UK solo
show since 2003, feature Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie having anal sex, Tom
Cruise sneaking a look at David Beckham's crotch at a urinal, Sir Paul
McCartney about to whack Heather Mills with a wooden leg, a rubber-gloved
Queen starting the washing up, Simon Cowell in the gym suggestively
positioned below a bodybuilder, and many of Amy Winehouse (in one receiving
an apparent rectal examination). The new shots of Winehouse don't quite
work, I say, because you can imagine the incident being caught on film for
real. These images don't add to what we know. Yes, Jackson assents in her
posh, playful voice, celebrities like Winehouse have “collapsed the boundary
between public and private”.
Have these blurrily shot works become one-note? The joke is glancing, then
suddenly over. Is it time for to Jackson to move on? She's taking “straight”
portraits of theatre stars now for J Sheekey's, the starry London fish
restaurant, she reveals - although this isn't the most ambitious of her
plans, it will emerge. “I do a lot of portraits, many no one sees,” she
says. “David Starkey, Beryl Bainbridge, David Cameron. I'm quite shy and in
awe of them. They are extraordinarily brilliant and I am minuscule in
comparison. With politicians it's amazing seeing them go from family person
to their public face in a flash.”
She has “quite a few Camerons'” on her books, and is renowned for her explicit
and rude mockery. Are these famous people nervous about her intentions? “I
know I have a mischievous streak but I'm quite formal. I don't have a
problem with doing well-behaved. I hope nothing rude pops out of my mouth.”
She is about to photograph someone whom she has featured in the past using a
lookalike. “I can't name them. It'll jinx it. I'll approach with great
caution.” How do celebrities react when they recognise her? “Some love it,
some don't, some go blank. Liz Hurley got huffy. Look, I'm not into
celebrity,” she says impatiently, “I'm into our perception of celebrity.”
You satirise celebrity, yet you've kind of become one, I say. “I don't mix
with celebrities,” she replies (adept at lobbing non-sequiturs if she
doesn't like a question). “I do these mischievous photographs and then
people invite me to lunch and sit me next to celebrities I've done lookalike
photos of - for fun. We think we know celebrities well. They're an object
which we have ownership over: magazine pictures, YouTube clips. Then you see
them for real and think, ‘This person exists, they're 3-D flesh and blood',
and you're stuck for words: it's the gap between who they are in your
imagination and realising you don't know them at all.”
For a start, they are smaller, she laughs. Her pictures aren't horrible, she
insists. “They play on things we think we know about celebrities anyway.”
Given the force of the images, she is surprisingly meek, claiming to
apologise to celebrities if she has caused them offence. Hard to square with
the gusty go-getter opposite me. “Mostly people are generous,” she says.
“Politicians liked Spitting Image didn't they? Jordan had breast
enlargements and reduction because she wanted comment on it.”
But she's adding to the culture of celebrity, herself, surely. If it wasn't
there, which seems to be her wish, she would have no source material. “No,
I'm commenting,” she says sharply, “and I take it seriously. It is madness
that people live their lives through people they don't know. It creates a
desire that's never-ending. It is totally removed from reality.”
Jackson has been interested in “the difference between a public persona and a
private life” since childhood. “I dressed in school uniform and lived in a
very different private world. I had a camera glued to my face from the age
of 7. If you live your life with the lens in front of your face you remove
yourself from being a participant and become an observer.” This sounds sad
for a little girl. Jackson had a materially privileged upbringing, but the
family's grand-sounding Hampshire pile was “in the middle of nowhere”, she
wasn't close to her brother and was “terribly unhappy” at boarding school.
“I was there from 7 to 18. It was horrible, horrible, horrible,” she says with
real bitterness. “Who would want to go to those cold prisons? The good thing
it gave me was this incredible discipline and focus. I can just apply
myself.” Did her parents know how unhappy she was? “They were of that
generation which said you went to boarding school and that was it. They knew
I didn't want to go back, at the end of every holiday I would hide in the
cupboards. The teachers and matrons, who would wash us, were just ferocious.
It was abominable, I'm not the type of person to be bullied but I wasn't a
group person. It wasn't a creative education. I couldn't wait to get away,
so I left at 18 and got a job at a production company, first as a secretary,
worked my way up, and produced adverts, including for BA. I learnt how to
create narratives in 30 seconds.”
She stayed in the job for eight years, earning “good money”, before leaving to
do a BA in sculpture at Chelsea College of Art. Why did she stay so
unfulfilled for so long? “The standard of my education was appalling,” she
says angrily. “I'd spent all those years in that Bleak House school. I
didn't know how to even think about what I wanted to do.” The sculpture
course meant she could make pots or take photographs, do what she liked,
which “terrified” her - she had always been so regimented. But soon she was
creating shows involving giant pictures of a woman on a cross while next to
it was, in reality, a female life model on a cross and so began her interest
in playing with our perceptions. At the Royal College of Art Jackson studied
fine art photography. “I hated photography. It's a slimy, deceitful medium.
It tells only a partial truth. Think of the famous picture of the napalm
girl taken in Vietnam. That's been cropped to make it look as if she is
dead, but the bigger picture reveals she is alive and surrounded by people.
But the image is seductive, we believe in it as if it is the whole truth.”
In her last term she produced the Diana-Dodi image. “Diana was a product of
image. Nobody knew her for real. I wondered if people would realise it was a
lookalike and if they did would they care and what they would make of this
image? It played into a lot of the fantasies then - that Diana and Dodi were
in love, that she was pregnant, and this had led to her possible murder.
People left flowers underneath my picture. It was a very beautiful, cute
image. It wasn't intended to offend anyone.”
Oh come on, I say. “I couldn't do my work thinking it would cause a storm,”
she retorts. “I was frightened someone would stop me showing the photograph.
This was the Royal College. And she looks down. “Weird people approached me
at that time.”
What does she mean? Was she threatened? “Yes, they said some people might come
and talk to me. They were quite serious.” Who were they? She becomes
flustered. “I don't know, I didn't pay attention and got out of there fast.
Nothing happened, thank God.”
Jackson wants to make a film about the Princess's life but can't find an adult
lookalike (“the problem is she's been dead for over ten years”). It's as bad
as trying to find a Gordon Brown. Despite castings in the UK and global
searches she can't find anyone to play him, “which is annoying as you don't
know how long he'll be PM. The problem is he has very old-fashioned looks,
Heathcliff or Rochester, tight breeches, muddy lanes, high collars, lambchop
face. I've just found an odd-job man in Bulgaria who might fit the bill
actually.” (She is also looking for Lily Allens, Gordon Ramsays and Marco
Pierre Whites.)
Once Jackson approached Nicolas Cage to ask if he would mind playing Nicolas
Cage in a shoot. Naturally the star got very annoyed and later on, when he
came to apologise to her, Jackson thought it was a lookalike and was rude to
him. Another time, shooting incognito a Richard Gere lookalike talking to a
Tibetan monk in a New York restaurant, the lookalike told the restaurant
staff she was harassing him and they, believing he was the real Gere,
chucked her out.
Jackson says her work since Diana and Dodi was to disguise that “one terrible
image”. That meekness again, but she denies she scares easily. “At the Royal
College you had to explain your work to your peers. If you couldn't, you
shouldn't have put it on the wall. It taught me to take responsibility for
everything.” You're as much of a voyeur as anyone, I say: the shots, which
use filters to get that verité feel, are deliberately outrageous. “We want
to see these private images of celebrities,” she shrugs.
The scene with Cherie and Caplin was funny, she claims, because we'd heard all
about the ex-PM's wife's alternative health obsessions. “I am a very private
person,” Jackson insists. “I don't want to delve into someone's private
life. I know where the boundaries are.” Another “Oh come off it!” from me.
“And I know where to break those boundaries,” she laughs. “The next boundary
could be absolutely horrific.” Which means a self-justifying carte blanche
to show anything she likes presumably, although she wouldn't do anything
“directly” about “Diana dying in the car” or Britney Spears's current
meltdown, but rather the press's interest in that meltdown (one new Jackson
image features photographers clustered around a coffin with Spears inside).
The end results are fun, not art surely? “It's a question,” Jackson accepts
after a pause. “They are a fast read but for me they are art and have
multiple layers. OK, they are about the moment, but they're also about our
obsession with celebrity, what we assume to be authentic turning out not to
be, everything being superficial and surface, soundbite, symbol and sign.”
After books (Confidential, Private, a forthcoming glossy Taschen number), TV
shows (the Bafta-winning Doubletake, Blaired Vision), next she wants to make
her art into a magazine. A one-off? “No, I shouldn't have said anything ...”
A weekly? “Yes.” Could she sustain that, a fake celebrity weekly? “Why not?”
Well, Heat has a weekly diet of real celebrity news. The way you work, the
set-ups are labour- intensive. How would she make it work? “It will take a
lot of work but I'm not interested in a one-off. It needs to be there in our
culture.”
Perhaps celebrities would end up wanting to appear in it. “I'd love that,” she
laughs. She also likes my suggested name of Not OK. But the joke would
become repetitive. “Is Heat repetitive?” she asks snappily. Yes, I say.
“Well I'd keep it fresh,” she retorts. Would it feature real celebrities or
fake ones? “Both.” More pictures than words? “I don't like too many words.”
She is yet to find a publisher. But it wouldn't be a one-person effort and
she would welcome collaborators. “I'm happiest over-producing,
over-creating. Some of the results might not be so good but my brain starts
to fly and that's when I go on to break the next boundary.”
If you liked the initial spikiness of Jackson's work, you want her to move on:
some of these new photos don't hit the spot - the Beckhams in bed, for
example, he reading Razzle, she looking at Names for Girls. Some of the
lookalikes, especially “Brad” and “Angelina”, don't look in any way like the
real thing. Perhaps she's aware of this. As well as the magazine, a new TV
series featuring the lookalikes is planned (and a “Borat-like” film about
how the public relates to lookalikes). She is writing a “partly
autobiographical” feature film and has returned to her sculptural training
with a series of silicon casts made of lookalikes' bodies.
Jackson rarely relaxes. “I'm not going to lie on my back on a beach and look
at the blue sky,” she says dismissively. Both her parents are dead, she's
sure her mother (who was wheelchair-bound after a riding accident) would
have said “Oh, what is she doing?” about her work. Her father died when she
was very young. She is very uneasy talking about her own life. While she
wishes her parents were still alive, she also believes “you suddenly realise
you are on your own” when both die. “It does spur you into areas which you
normally wouldn't do.” Jackson is single and doesn't have children. “I don't
mind all of that,” she says referring to marriage, “but I've escaped a few
times. It wasn't what I wanted, the right time.” Does she want children?
“Yeah, I'd love to but not right now. I'm very excited about all the things
I'm doing.” No, she'd never go out with a lookalike - even if her search for
a sexy Gordon is successful.
She is a vector of busy-ness: phones trill around her, you sense she might be
controlling, but maybe her work demands that. The next day she is off to LA.
Her urgency seems rooted in those “utterly dismal” school and early career
years. “Education is the most important thing and I wasn't educated,” she
claims forcefully. But she wasn't exactly destitute materially, I say, her
parents were well-off. “It had nothing to do with money,” Jackson says.
“Without education you're stuck. I had to work for money. I was dying to be
a film director but all these men were saying no. The whole thing seemed
impossible.” Did she get depressed? “Probably all the time. Things didn't
come easily.” Even today she is stalked by feelings of hopelessness. “All
the time. Every day. When I can't get what I want. Then I try another route.
I'll see something and fight for it.”
Jackson is clearly tough, and jokes things must be done “my way”, while
valuing whoever in her team has “the best ideas”. She used to race Austin
Healy sports cars and ride (dressage and eventing) until her mother's
accident made it “too bloody terrifying”. She seems a little wild, I say. “I
like to be a bit decadent but you've got to decide - are you going to get up
at 6am and get some ‘undiscipline' in the work, or are you going to be wild
and undisciplined in your social life and not get any work done?”
The final, weird twist is that the little girl hiding behind the camera now
wants to be in front of the camera performing. “It's great fun,” Jackson
says. “You can play. Behind the camera it is hugely disciplined. But my
father was a great performer. It's too late for me to be an actress. But
I've dressed up as Osama bin Laden for some of my lookalike work, and then
five years ago I did a body of work which I've never shown where I was
dressed up as personalities: Marilyn Monroe, Diana, Monica Lewinsky. It was
hilarious.”
She may interrogate our relationship with celebrity, but how deliciously
wrongfooting - Alison Jackson also wants to play the star.
Alison Jackson, Seeing is Deceiving, Hamiltons Gallery, 13 Carlos Place,
London W1 (www.hamiltonsgallery.com
020-7499 9493/4), April 16- May 17
