The Art of the Royal Doppelgänger Photo

When footage emerged this week of the Princess of Wales, a.k.a. Kate Middleton, strolling at a farm shop in the U.K. with husband Prince William, the Daily Mail declared that the images would no doubt “silence the conspiracy theorists” who have been feasting since she disappeared from the public eye earlier this year. But the Mail underestimated the conspiracy theorists. “This clearly looks like the work of Alison Jackson, who has been doing fake royal photos for years,” said one such person on X.

As Middletonmania has spread in recent weeks, several people have raised the London-based artist’s name and work. Perhaps you’ve seen one of her old photos of a fake Queen Camilla — wearing a crown, sipping a scotch, and holding a cigarette — to joke that she might be pulling a Saltburn at Buckingham Palace. But Jackson’s work predates X: Since the late ’90s, when she first caused an uproar in the British press by using look-alikes to create photos of Princess Diana giving the finger or sharing a child with Dodi Fayed, Jackson has made a career of producing fake paparazzi-style photos and videos of celebrities, most notably of the British royal family. One famous 2003 image appears to show Queen Elizabeth II sitting on a toilet. Another from that same year purports to show Kate writing “king” in lipstick on her then-boyfriend’s chest. In recent years, Jackson has been kept busy by another subject: Donald Trump.

Jackson — who won a BAFTA for her early-2000s comedy series Doubletake, which employed the same fake-footage idea to mock the royals, Tony Blair, and David Beckham, among others — opened up about the renewed attention her work is getting amid this latest royal scandal and shared some tips on how to spot a fake photo of a princess.

Much of the work for which you are famous examines the link between celebrity and the public, between the fake and the real. Why do you find this idea so ripe for art?
Well, because obviously we cannot determine what is real or what is fake anymore. All our information is from the bombardment of imagery through the media. First, the very nature of photography cheats you; it allows you to believe something that isn’t necessarily the full truth. And second, the media exploits the fact that you can’t trust the very nature of a photograph, and all of us don’t really care. We don’t care about being exploited. We just want to see more of the world and everything going on around us. It feeds into our imagination, which we’ve never had before like this. And it makes a world of entertainment, a world of unreality, which is more palatable than the world of reality.

It also makes us an extreme armchair voyeur. We don’t have to get up and do anything — we just have to watch. We’re pacified by the media, videos, and television. We think we know people intimately, but none of us know them for real — or very few of us know them for real — and yet we’re absorbed as if we know them. They’re our best friends and we like to push them up and pull them down alongside the media. We don’t care how much truth is in there. I find that a whole fascinating situation for the world to be in — and dangerous as well.

What drew you to the royals, in particular, as subjects?
It’s wonderful that they’re shrouded in mystique. They’re more mysterious with their private lives, but none of us have private lives like that. So it becomes intriguing: What are they like? We feel we know them intimately through the media, even though we’ve never met them.

More subconsciously, we know that we pay for them. They wouldn’t exist unless we actually paid for them out of our tax money. Therefore, they definitely owe us anything we want to know. The collective force has become very demanding, but I do think there’s boundaries here. I don’t think Kate really has to tell the most private, intimate things about her lower abdomen. To me, it’s just absolutely shocking that people should demand that type of private information.

How do you go about the casting process when you’re looking for a fake royal or celebrity to shoot?
It’s very, very difficult to find people. I’m always chasing people down the street, going, “Hey, you look like Kate! Hey, you look like Meghan! Hey, you look like Harry!” It’s an absolute nightmare to find people, so if you know anyone who looks like anyone …

I definitely need a Meghan. I found a very good Harry through advertising. I need a Donald Trump fast, because I want to make a hilarious film leading up to the election. And Donald Trump has changed; I think he’s had a facelift. I think he’s got to keep up with Biden, hasn’t he? They’re about the same age, and he doesn’t want to look as creaky as that.

The English Cabinet would be good — Rishi Sunak. There’s a guy that raves in Ibiza who looks like Sunak, but he can never get out of bed before 6 p.m. He’s always busy getting ready for the night. So we haven’t been able to track him down for a shoot that begins at 8 in the morning.

I’m curious about how litigious these people can be. Have you ever had any legal pushback?
It’s always just a “no comment.” Harry and Meghan are not royal anymore, so they may!

In the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing a lot about the pressure that the palace might place on the press. I’m wondering if you’ve ever encountered any of that pressure yourself. Any stern phone calls?
Well, not exactly. I have had phone calls, but the palace wouldn’t say anything about what I’m doing. They have to be above all of that. They have to take everything on the chin; I think that is their job, really. Certainly with the queen, she’s had to take everything on the chin. I believe Camilla collects my books, actually.

You said you had phone calls, but not from the palace. What did you mean?
Well, I’ve made some quite controversial stuff. At the time of doing the Princess Diana work, it got a bit heated. Prince Philip was alive then. I was at the Royal College of Art, and they were trying to expel me. Prince Philip would not open the show. I’m sometimes dropped from boards and things if a royal comes on. I was with an art gallery, and I had to suddenly leave because one of the royals started. So they do get in the way sometimes.

There are very few celebrities who get really angry. I think they misunderstand what I’m trying to do. It’s not really about them; it’s about our perception of them, our perception of celebrity. And maybe I’m not making my point clear enough.

Donald Trump’s always angry, so it’s always a big worry. And I always get all my ideas cleared by a lawyer. Every single idea, before I make it, is run by my lawyer. It’s all a very expensive process, as you can imagine.

Have you fallen into the Kate Middleton conspiracies?
What do you mean? Give me an example.

Well, there are a lot online that are both humorous and serious. Some are speculating she may have gone to have plastic surgery, while others are guessing that a royal divorce may be coming.
It’s all speculation, isn’t it? While she’s disappeared and gone out of public view and there’s no comment, people will attack. That’s just the nature of humans. So she’s left it wide open.

King Charles cleverly told the world that he had some terrible, intimate operation, and I feel sorry for him that you’ve got to tell everyone about that! I can imagine that the operation is really quite horrible. So he’s sort of stopped it, and he’s got the world on his side a bit. Kate’s a young woman, and she’s had an operation in a very sensitive area. Clearly, like most of us, she won’t want to talk about that.

Let’s talk about the photos. I think one of the first images we got of Kate was a grainy paparazzi photo of her in a car with her mother. I’m curious if you saw that and thought it was her or one of your body doubles.
Well, there’s been no evidence of Kate using look-alikes before. So I don’t think it’s a Kate setup. And no one has come forward to claim these photographs as look-alikes, have they?

No, but this is the kind of conspiracy rabbit hole that a lot of people online are diving into!
It’s fascinating that The Sun has come up with this Kate and William farm shot, because it doesn’t look anything like Kate, does it?

I was going to ask about that video. You think it’s a body double?
Well, it doesn’t really look like William, either. It’s just a guy with a hat on, and my look-alike is so good that he looks like that William with a hat on. It could well be look-alikes, but I can’t believe the royal family would do that themselves, because they’re asking for too much trouble. It has to either be a fake or real, but it doesn’t look like Kate.

Given that the work you do is arguably designed to trick viewers, what do you think of the backlash Kate got for editing her family photos?
Doesn’t everyone retouch a photo? I’ve got an app on my phone that changes me radically on a bad day. So what’s the scandal about her? I’d say the scandal about the photograph is that she probably didn’t retouch it enough! It looked like she was just retouching a little bit of a hand or something there. I don’t think it’s a problem that people retouch their pictures. It’s not like she was cloning other children in or anything.

Since the royals were plunged into crisis, I’ve seen people online using some of your art of Queen Camilla to make jokes about her doing a Saltburn at Buckingham Palace. Do you feel proud of that, or like you’re a Russian troll feeding misinformation?
Well, my stuff is clearly not real, isn’t it? But it’s meant to appear real for a nanosecond so you can buy into it as real, but then you realize that they’re a look-alike. I’m trying to raise awareness that we can’t believe everything we see.

And now we’ve got AI. It doesn’t matter if you use look-alikes or AI or stage it in some way — you’re still doing the same thing. It’s creating things that aren’t real, which could be real in our world of unreality. It’s just gonna get worse, because AI means that anyone can do it on their phone. Instead of it just being an occasional photograph of Will and Kate at the farm shop — if it really is fake — it’s going to be every day.

If we get a new photo of Kate, what should we be looking for as viewers to verify if it’s real?
Well, it’s gotta look like them, for a start! And nothing mismatched in the background.

And what tips would you have for a royal family who might be looking to stage photos? What’s the secret?
Do I have to give away my secret?! No, I thought the video of William and Kate at the farm shop was a very boring video. It bored me rigid. But it was nicely shot through the cars as if it was all incidental, and you didn’t really see Will and Kate that much. You just caught a glimpse of them. Well, that’s the way I shoot. It looked like somebody had been studying the way I shoot!

It took me a long time to learn that. I was highly educated — nine years of education and diplomas, the University of the Arts, the Royal College of Art, so on and so forth — all just to learn how to shoot really badly.

But it wasn’t me, by the way.