‘My Work Is About How Much I Hate Photography’ – Meet Faux Celeb Photographer Alison Jackson

In The Artist’s Studio

Alison Jackson Studios

Alison Jackson’s work has been stopping people in their tracks for decades. Yet her startling reminders of the manipulations of our hypervisual culture have never seemed more potent than today. ‘We now live our lives through photography and imagery,’ she says. ‘We’re bombarded with social media images. Everything is images…’

Her distinctive photographs, seemingly catching famous faces in eyebrow-raising situations, are edited from around 40,000 frames to choose the perfect confusing shot. That might be President Trump, hapless PMs, members of the Royal Family or the Beckhams, off-duty at home. It’s an irony that her practice is founded in her dislike of the artifice of photography.

Alison Jackson Studios

‘I considered it to be a deceitful medium,’ she says stridently of her student days. ‘But then I was slightly dumped into the photography department at the Royal College of Art.’ She’d wanted to stick with sculpture, but because her photography was so strong, the college insisted she switch mediums.

‘I was disgruntled, so I made this whole body of work about how much I hate photography. You’re drawn into believing you’re looking at something real, but actually there’s no way you can ever tell whether it’s real or not. And I ended up saying, “Well, I’ll prove it. Look: this looks real, but it’s not real.”’

Alison Jackson Studios

Jackson has remained passionately energised by this idea. Her HQ is split between her studio in Notting Hill, a larger space to get messier in Wembley (where she works on hyperrealistic sculptures too), and a lot of time out on location. ‘We’re always working on two or three projects at a time.’ A large part of this is the pre-production, which sees Jackson typically spend around two weeks perfecting the set, building her own version of the House of Commons or Oval Office. The lookalikes have to be extensively coached, too, in walking and talking to create the kind of magic we see in her images.

Alison Jackson Studios

She still uses skills honed before art school as a young production assistant to big-shot directors; she worked for Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker and Ridley Scott when it was almost unheard of for a feisty female director to get behind the camera. That influence is there in the exacting production values in her work, including weeks of painstaking post-production.

Her casting director eye is always on, running after people in the street or stopping them in a restaurant. That can be a high-risk commitment to her art: ‘Sometimes I go up to them and they turn out to be the real person,’ she laughs. Jackson once approached George Clooney in Capri to persuade him to model as a lookalike for himself in her work. ‘He saw the funny side in the end.’ Meanwhile, if anyone knows someone with long eyelashes and a look of Andy Burnham, let her know…

Alison Jackson is showing at W1 Curates in Spring 2027, w1curates.com