Her latest project is A Day in Your Life, an award she set up three years ago to identify undiscovered photographic talent. Her enthusiasm for this year’s competition is palpable. “People, especially young talent, so often don’t get encouraged, and perhaps don’t even know that they’re talented. We want people who have something unique in the way they see the world, something really special.”
Of course, we’re all photographers now, curating our public-facing lives in a way that would have seemed extraordinary to previous generations. A Day in Your Life seeks to help people recognise that taking pictures and posting them on social media is actually an artform. “People think it’s easy to create good images, and it’s really not,” says Jackson. “[To be successful] you have to find your own unique look, or vision, or eye.”
The pictures from last year’s competition are particularly powerful – showing the strange, circumscribed lives of city-dwellers during the pandemic. There are lonely figures in unpeopled streets, faces behind windows, brief moments of connection.
What’s striking about many of the images is that they have the same voyeuristic, almost intrusive atmosphere that we see in Jackson’s own work. “It does really appeal to me because that’s exactly what I’ve been shooting for years,” Jackson says. “Through door-frames and cracked windows. Now we’re all living through that. What it’s doing to us as a society, I find really interesting.”
Jackson herself had an immensely privileged upbringing. The daughter of a landowner and classic-car enthusiast, she grew up on a country estate in Hampshire inherited from the Hulbert family by her father, George Hulbert Mowbray-Jackson, then she moved to another grand home in Gloucestershire. She has spoken in the past about the vast number of staff employed by her parents, including people to maintain her father’s own private petrol-pump.
After boarding school, she worked as a receptionist at a Soho film-production company before starting 10 years of study: night courses, short courses, a BA in sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art, and an MA in her “hated” medium, photography.
