Alison Jackson's Quotes

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.

I think privacy is important, and it's important you don't bore people with your own boring self.

I'm particularly interested in how you can't rely on your own perception.

Of course, my own political beliefs inform the ideas I come up with.

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.

The only people I really hate are parking attendants.

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 about him.

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.

I had a very outdoorsy childhood. I was athletic and used to ride and do dressage. I could ride almost before I could walk. There is a picture of me at 18 months old sitting happily on the back of a donkey.

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'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.

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.

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.

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 what is real or fake anymore. It doesn't matter.