Alison jackson

When I am preparing my 'lookalike' photographs, I think about the character of the real people, because, if the photographs are going to be plausible, you have to convince the viewer that they could...

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 wanted to leave the country, head for London...

It's always difficult to see yourself as other people do, but I'm realistic about my appearance. I wasn't born with one of those pretty, pretty faces, so I've never been absorbed with the way I look....

I'm really interested in how we view the public figure, what makes a public figure, what makes a celebrity, and how images make politicians, so I take an interest in politics, but it's really an...

Celebrities do look different in real life from our images of them - there is a big gap. And that is what my work is about: the gap between the image and the celebrity themselves.

There is a wall of myth around royals and A-list celebrities, and that makes us wonder what they are really like. We see them on magazine covers so often that we think we know them intimately, and we...

I suppose we carry photographs now, but I think it's rather wonderful that people used to carry drawings and watercolours. I wish people did that more often.

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...

Now celebrity has taken on a holy status all of its own, and we look to the stars to provide us with the transcendental experience that was once achieved through religion.

I go up to people and ask if I can use them in my photos. Occasionally it is the person in question, as happened with James Hewitt. How embarrassing. He just laughed and said, 'You can't afford me.'