Alison Jackson's celebrity images seem like the work of a seasoned and excessive paparazzi, as if they had been taken carelessly, without their protagonists having realized it. But how could she access that sinister moment in which Michael Jackson defaces a child's face with lipstick? Surprise Queen Elizabeth II of England in the privacy of her toilet, with her panties below her knees? Or catch Jack Nicholson playing with bikini-clad groupies inside a swimming pool? Nothing we see is real, but everything could have happened. Because the fake can be as good as the real, considers the controversial British photographer, who tries to capture in images what we fantasize about or suspect is true.
Alison Jackson, who preserves the punk spirit of the student who dyed her hair green and pink and wore safety pins in her ears, exhibits at Roca Umbert Fàbrica de les Arts de Granollers Truth is dead, a selection of a torrential series about celebrities, the media circus that accompanies them, voyeurism, the truth or not of what we see or the right we have to do so, with which she has become a celebrity herself. It is not about photoshop, but about scenes that she recreates with flesh and blood doubles that she obsessively captures on the streets or in airports. Right now he is hunting for associates of Rosalía, King Felipe and Princess Leonor, also for a young Lady Di because hers has aged, as he explained yesterday within the framework of the Panoràmic film and photography festival, in which he has landed , ironic and somewhat hooligan, as a star.
Jackson has been censored and on many occasions has had to escape on her own to avoid being arrested. She rose to fame in 1998, with a photo of Diana of Wales doing the comb, actually a painting that emerged from a previous video, from when she was still a student at the Royal College of Art, in which she was shown highly sexualized, crossing legs like Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct, but with underwear. It was due to be screened in Leicester Square, but the Blair government banned it. “The fantasy we created about the image of this woman, the desire to capture her, is what killed her. It's a fascinating topic for me." The commotion was soon overcome when she showed her in a family portrait alongside Dodi al-Fayed and a mixed-race child, the son they both could have had.
Jackson's images seem to reveal a secret that someone wanted never to come to light. A little further on we see Donald Trump walking hugging members of the Ku Klux Klan with a burning cross in the background. “His father seems to have been a member of the KKK, although it was never proven and he himself, when violence broke out in Charlottesville in 2017, never condemned it,” he argues. To recreate the scene he did not travel to Alabama but did it in Richmond Park in London. “It must have been a terrifying sight,” he says, and remembers with a laugh that Trump's threat to ban it did the impossible to get it on the cover of The Guardian.
Trump appears again in a bathrobe, sitting on a bed, with his arm on Putin's shoulder. “They taught him to be a king and a murderer, to be arrogant as if he were untouchable and to have positive thinking.” He says that his double doesn't look like him until he puts a wig on him and dyes his face orange, but the most disturbing thing is that "I had to stop working with him for a year and a half because he turned into a monster, he thought he was the "Trump himself and attacked women."
Something similar happened to Richard Gere's double, who arrived pursued by the police to a session where he had to pose in a pool with Jack Nicholson, after leaving several women tied up in a motel. Truth or fiction? Impossible to know if it happened, if it is the whole truth or just part of the truth. Like Kim Kardashian's butt floating in a tank of water, Elton John undergoing an enema (the photograph was bought by the musician himself), or Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt buying children or David Beckham naked with a hot dog between his legs .
But its great battlefield is the British royal family: Elizabeth II watching how some stallions mate, the current Queen Camilla in her underwear “doing what she knows how to do: drinking, smoking and waiting patiently” when the King was still married to Diana , or sharing a hair salon with her mother-in-law and Kate Middleton. Her next project: incorporating AI without leaving the recreations with real beings, "because they contain what artificial intelligence will never have, flesh and blood."
