Alison Jackson's 2003 collection of staged lookalike photographs, in which doubles for David Beckham, Diana, Tony Blair and the royal family are caught in private moments that never happened.
Published in London by Michael Joseph, a Penguin imprint, Private gathers the black-and-white and colour pictures Jackson had been making since the late 1990s. They are shot to pass as snatched paparazzi frames and printed without captions or page numbers. A Beckham double bares a tattooed backside in a bathroom on the cover; inside, politicians and royals are shown off duty. Jackson's foreword sets out the premise: the public knows its celebrities only through photographs, and the photograph has become more real than the person. The critic Waldemar Januszczak contributes the closing essay. Issued in laminated pictorial boards without a jacket. A Penguin paperback followed in 2004.
Jackson (b. 1960) studied sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and took an MA at the Royal College of Art. Her 1999 degree show introduced Mental Images, the Diana and Dodi photographs that set the pattern for all her later work. Her BBC Two series Doubletake (2002-03, with Tiger Aspect) won a BAFTA. She went on to publish Confidential (Taschen, 2007) and further self-published volumes under the Private title.
Notes
Out of print; Penguin UK has no live product page (penguin.co.uk/books/9780718147181 redirects to search), so publisher.url points to the OpenLibrary edition record, the most complete authoritative listing. Pagination conflicts: Getty MARC says unpaged; OpenLibrary [160] p.; Internet Archive 'approximately [134] pages'; dealers say 128 pp and 160 pp. 160 used (OpenLibrary collation, matched by a dealer); the book carries no printed page numbers. Height 23 cm per Getty (Internet Archive says 24 cm); width not recorded by any source. Getty MARC: 'Essay by Waldemar Januszczak'; Internet Archive: foreword by Jackson, afterword by Januszczak. Cover: existing 420x500 file confirmed as the real front cover (Beckham double, 'PRIVATE ALISON JACKSON' top left); no larger image found (AbeBooks ISBN image is a 500x281 angled seller shot, AbeBooks inventory photo 400x476, OpenLibrary 381x500, Amazon 399x475), so the file was kept. Tags are editorial; the only LCSH on the Getty record is 'Photography, Artistic', the Lookalikes/Celebrities headings come via OpenLibrary and the Internet Archive record. 'Turner-nominated' from the brief could not be confirmed and was not used. Paperback edition: Penguin 2004, ISBN 9780141019185. Subjects (LOC): Photography, Artistic; Lookalikes -- Pictorial works; Celebrities -- Humor.
