The King and I ...why the royal show goes on for Alison Jackson
She’s attracted bouquets and brickbats for her spoof celebrity photography and despite the passing of her most famous muse, the award-winning artist won’t be putting down her camera
BAFTA-WINNING artist Alison Jackson has a problem. For more than two decades she’s commanded five-figure fees for her brilliant spoof photographs lampooning celebrities in intimate, sometimes compromising, situations. The amusing paparazzi-style shots have included, among many others, Donald Trump getting a spray tan, the Queen, Camilla and Kate having their hair done and David Beckham clad only in his pants and fluffy oven gloves cooking fish fingers for his wife Victoria.
Until last month, the Queen was the photographer’s number one muse. Jackson famously staged lookalikes of the monarch shopping at Tesco and eating breakfast in bed with her corgis. Her passing put an immediate end to any more such pictures.
Now, the mischievous photographer admits she lacks a convincing doppelgänger for her biggest future moneymaker. “I don’t really have a King Charles,” she says.
Twenty years after making the BBC series Double Take, she is in discussions about another TV show. Nothing is confirmed but she’s fascinated by Charles’s irritation with pens. The King vented his frustration at his proclamation and with a leaky pen at a book signing at Hillsborough Castle last month.
“In my television series in the past, if there was a clip like that, I would always make a continuation from ‘before’ to ‘after’, which is always fun… it’s the guessing game of how did that [moment] arrive like that?” she explains.
SO SHE plans to reimagine it in some way? “Absolutely, yeah it’s fun.” But hang on, she has created cheeky scenarios of Charles before so must have a lookalike? “Well, you never see his face if you look at my photos,” she replies. Aren’t there tons of Charles lookalikes gearing up for duty?
“Not yet,” she says. “And I find it difficult to see what he looks like because he’s got a mobile face. There is one Prince Charles guy who’s great, but he’s an impersonator… he doesn’t necessarily look like King Charles.”
She’s pressed pause for now, out of respect for the Queen, but insists: “We’ll see what Prince Charles is like as King. He’s very different from his mother – he doesn’t zip up. Prince William is zipped, the Queen was zipped; Charles likes to talk.”
As devilishly frank with her words as her images, Jackson is an entertaining interviewee. We are meeting to discuss her recent photography competition, A Day In Your Life, which invites budding photographers to capture a slice of life, with winning entries displayed at London’s Saatchi Gallery.
Jackson, who lives in London, looks incredible at 62 in skin-tight black leather trousers and high heels, offset by scarlet lips and cropped platinum hair.
Her voice is gruff; she’s working all hours running workshops and is exhausted. But three designer jackets hang off the back of a chair in preparation for our photo-shoot and when the camera flashes, she works the poses.
Her own images typically test the boundaries of decency, tapping into questions of public voyeurism and the murky line between reality and perception. “It is trying to burst the bubble – our perception reached through the media – about them,” she says.
Yet here she is nurturing young talent in straightforward imagery. Now in its third year, the competition has four age categories, starting with seven to 12-year-olds, and formidable judges, photographer Rankin and Sir Trevor Phillips. What’s her motivation? “There’s a gap there, the kids need creative tuition at a young age and they love it. It can set them on a different path in their lives and gives them an option. They don’t have to take a boring job, they can do an exciting or creative one.”
Her own photo session over, she sits next to me on her plush sofa sharing some expert shots I would never have guessed were taken by youngsters. “Photography isn’t just photography,” she says. “I can see which ones are directors, stylists, models, actors and gymnasts because they’re doing it all in front of the camera. So this one vehicle, a camera, opens up various possibilities.”
She first picked up a camera when she was nine but didn’t know what to do with it. “I didn’t go to college at a normal age. I worked in TV production, and they [the production bosses] wouldn’t allow me to direct films because they wanted men to direct them.”
It was in 1999, aged 30 and studyRECENTLY
‘Can you imagine running after someone in the street saying, “Oh, you look exactly like Putin”?’
ing at the Royal College of Art, that she first came to national attention and narrowly dodged expulsion. She applied to study sculpture but the college saw talent as a photographer.
“Suddenly the whole of my body of work was how much I hate photography and that you can’t trust it,” she reflects.
“It’s a slimy, deceitful medium. You think you can believe it but it seduces you and plays a terrible trick on you.”
Princess Diana had died two years earlier, prompting a public outpouring of grief.The response had bamboozled Jackson.
“Very few people had met her but people were hysterical over her death and I thought it was bizarre,” she says. “They only knew her through images and stories.”
Combining both trains of thoughts, her earliest picture was a Princess Di lookalike raising her middle finger to the lens. But as she experimented, she was threatened with breach of copyright from a leading photographer, which nearly led to her expulsion.
Undeterred, she shot actors posing as Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed doting over their baby.The image shocked people.
“I was raising questions,” she says today. “Now everyone talks about fake news but then people didn’t question what they saw. I’ve always been clear these are actors with wigs or lookalikes. This is not real. Even today, when my work goes viral on social media, people ask if it’s real.”
She has nearly been arrested several times and was almost sued for her spoof pictures of Donald Trump appearing in a compromising situation in the Oval Office with a Miss Mexico, as well as images of the then US President with the Ku Klux Klan. She has no regrets.
“I never put any work out unless I can stand by it. End of story.”
She’s a royalist, she stresses several times. An especially shocking image of the late Queen in the loo was about breaking taboos.
“It was trying to humanise her because the thing about imagery is that it totally desensitises you to what the real person is like,” she tells me. “It creates a false picture and a lie about the person around them.”
She has blurred reality on occasion by featuring real celebrities in the faux scenarios, most notably Elton John playing the piano with a doppelgänger Queen.
Once, to Jackson’s horror, she was seated at the same table as the late monarch at an event.The host pointedAlison out.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I wish the ground would swallow me up and make me disappear’, but she was smiling. She had a great sense of humour.”
The Queen Consort is also said to be a fan. “I hear Camilla collects my books.” Her younger Camilla wearing the crown as she holds a cigarette and drink still goes viral as does Bill Clinton receiving a bedroom massage.
She’s decided Islamic State is too dangerous a subject matter but did once do a show about Osama bin Laden. “The antiterrorist squad used to follow me around a bit,” she recalls. “And I got a few weird phone calls. You have to be careful, but I haven’t done anything too tricky lately.”
She is currently planning something involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin. Does she worry about the latter’s reaction?
“It depends on what I do. It depends on what he does.”
She is always on the lookout for new models. “I run after people down the street, it’s terribly embarrassing. Can you imagine running after someone who looks like Putin saying, ‘Oh, you look exactly like Putin’? They’re not actually going to be pleased.”
Her friend chased down a “very good Zelensky lookalike” in England a month ago but he’s got a full-time job, so she’s still on the hunt for another one.
All in all, it sounds like a thankless merrygo-round of exhausting work. Jackson spends days on a single photo-shoot, styling every blade of hair into place. “The reason why nobody’s been consistent with copying my work is that the styling and the angles on the lookers are incredibly difficult to do,” she says.
“If you don’t get it absolutely right, it’s not believable, the spell’s broken.”
This year, she made £100,000 for a platinum sculpture of the Queen. She has also shot portraits of A-listers including Benedict Cumberbatch, Vanessa Redgrave and Eddie Redmayne. Her father was George Hulbert Mowbray-Jackson, who inherited the grand estate of Poulton Priory in Gloucestershire.
JACKSON has previously recalled an “army” of help servicing the home’s tennis courts and petrol pumps for the family’s motors. But she was left without a penny after it was left to her older brother on her father’s death and he sold it for £11.5million. I ask how she feels about that now. She chooses her words carefully.
“It’s just the way it is,” she begins. “I don’t think it’s fair. It’s a shame for women that inequality is unfair. It’s a man’s world.”
She perks up again when we talk about Britain leading the charge for global creativity. “Over the years, we’ve had all sorts of movements, from the Sixties to punk. Now, it’s bland. We need to invest in creative education – it’s for the benefit of everyone. It makes money for the person and the UK.”
She stifles a yawn, so I finish the interview. She’ll be up until late into the night reviewing more photographic entries. After the exhibition is over, maybe she’ll take a small break. “It would be great to just do straight portraits or scripted drama – you could half the workload,” she says. “But I still haven’t finished what I’m doing. There’s always another story, isn’t there?”