About Alison Jackson: Alison Jackson is an English artist known for her lookalike photographs of celebrities. She has won a BAFTA for BBC 2's series Doubletake. She has also had three collections of her photographic work published.
I think my parents had in mind that I would settle down at quite a young age, but I decided that being a housewife in a big country house wasn't for me.
I think my parents had in mind that I would settle down at quite a young age, but I decided that being a housewife in a big country house wasn't for me. I wanted to leave the country, head for London and see what the world had to offer.
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'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.
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.
Now celebrity has taken on a holy status all of its own, and we look to the stars to provide us with the transcendental experience that was once achieved through religion.
I am fascinated by the Royal Family because they are shrouded in mystique, and the Queen, and to a certain extent William, represent fabulous blank canvases. I find the Prince of Wales less fascinating because he spills the beans and we know too much...
I don't really like using ridicule as a form of humor.
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 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.
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 wh...
Celebrities do look different in real life from our images of them - there is a big gap. And that is what my work is about: the gap between the image and the celebrity themselves.
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.
Because Bin Laden's culture doesn't permit the worship of images, they understand how powerful images are. We wouldn't have thought of creating a visual bomb. In a way, he's chopped down two iconic buildings, and used our very truth imagery, to expre...
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.
Of course, my own political beliefs inform the ideas I come up with.
A lot of people who look at my photographs think it is an easy joke, but it does take a bit of thinking about.
Among other things, I use a Samsung mobile phone, a very bad quality video camera, and an old Olympus with extremely bad Sigma lenses.
The only people I really hate are parking attendants.
I think privacy is important, and it's important you don't bore people with your own boring self.
