By making photographs that seem to show our favorite celebs (Diana, Elton John) doing what we really, secretly, want to see them doing, Alison Jackson explores our desire to get personal with celebs. Contains graphic images.
“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 advertising, all with the same concept. And it’s about our fixation with celebrity and celebrity culture, and the importance of the image. Celebrity is born of photography.
So I’m going to start with how I started with this concept seven years ago, when Princess Diana died. There was sort of a standstill in Britain the day, or the moment of her death, and people decided to mourn her death in a sort of mass way. I was fascinated by this phenomenon. So I wondered: could one erase the image of Diana actually quite crudely and physically? So I got a gun and started to shoot at the image of Diana. But I couldn’t erase this from my memory, and certainly it was not being erased from the public psyche. Momentum was being built. The press wrote about her death in rather, I felt, pornographic ways, like which bit of artery left which bit of body, and how did she die in the back of the car. “
