alison jackson

Descobri por estes dias um livro de fotografia muito bom.
"Private" de Alison Jackson. Quando o folheei da primeira vez,
algo apressado e distraído, chegou a espantar-me e a enganar-me.
Não vou dizer mais, deixo aqui transcritas as palavras da própria
autora. Terá alguns detractores, gente que a considera uma
fotógrafa de muito mau gosto.

Eu gosto de artistas ousados. Que caminham sobre o fio da navalha.
Gosto de agentes provocadores.


(fotos de Alison Jackson, por mim fotografadas a partir do écran
de um computador)

"My aim is to explore the blurred boundaries between reality
and the imaginary – the gap and confusion between the two.
I recreate scenes of our greatest fears which we think are
documentary but are fiction. I use look-alikes of celebrities and
public figures to create a seemingly real documentary scenario
which is in fact a fiction. Likeness becomes real and fantasy
touches on the believable. The viewer is suspended in disbelief.
I try to highlight the psychological relationship between what we
see and what we imagine. This is bound up in our need to look –
our voyeurism – and our need to believe. My work is about
simulation. Creating a clone of a copy of the ‘real’ on paper. It is
not a fake, it takes a place of the ‘real’ for a moment whilst
looking at the image. As Baudrillard puts it, simulation is
different from feigning. Feigning is pretending, such as, feigning
illness or pretending to be ill. The subject is not ill, just seeming
to be, but ‘simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and
‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. Since the simulator
produces ‘true’ symptoms, is he ill or not. He cannot be treated
objectively either as ill or not ill. ‘1
This is what I aim to do: Create likenesses of icons, where in
image – on paper – the simulation of icons, ‘threatens the
difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’, between ‘real’ and
‘imaginary’. The ‘real’ subject becomes ‘not necessary’. The
image or icon is ore important and more seductive. It doesn’t
matter if it isn’t the ‘real’ icon – as long as it looks like him or
her – but it creates a temporary confusion. This is the confusion
I search to create in my work, to explore this gap. Within this,
I have explored to what extent do I create complete fantasy
pictures not connected to anything ‘real’ other than fantasy
floating around in the mass mind and fantasy connected to
something ‘real’. A scenario that has some ‘truth’ in the concrete
sense and I extend this ‘truth’."

1 Baudrillard J The Procession of Simulacra Art After Modernism Re
Thinking Representation The New Museum of Contemporary Art NY
Boston 1989 p254