Satire

Mock the Week

Alison Jackson

I started looking at Alison Jackson's work for the fanatic project (as she has done a lot of photographs of Royal satire) but I feel it would be relevant to look at her work for this project too. Photojournalism is a very influential part of the news and I love the fact that Jackson has turned this completely on it's head, by taking embarrassing (and hilarious) photos of politicians that could easily be real. I remember seeing the photo of Peter Mandelson making up Nick Clegg on the front cover of a newspaper magazine and being really intrigued by it, thinking "this can't be real?!" I love Alison Jackson's work because it so cleverly and effectively questions the trust we put in what we read in newspapers, and how we assume everything we read must be true.

This idea is something I've been exploring in my FMP - I'm really interested in how much influence the Evening Standard can have as a free paper and whether a free paper should really have that much power. On the Standard's website they say, "The power of the paper to influence the Political community should not be underestimated," which I find quite a daunting idea; there is a lot of speculation that the Evening Standard did in fact help lead Boris Johnson to victory over Ken Livingstone in the mayoral election of 2008. So, I've started to think about how I could explore this in my work - the above image is one idea I've come up with - to create a satirical version of the paper called the Evening Boris.