Five photographs by Mandy Lee Jandrell were acquired by the UK Government Art Collection in 2005, and works from this series have since been exhibited in prestigious governmental settings including 10 Downing Street, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and the Government Art Collection Gallery in London.

These photographs feature miniature versions of internationally recognisable landmarks—sites from Britain, France, Egypt, India and China—captured in a way that initially appears documentary and authentic. Tourists pose formally in front of these iconic backdrops, echoing common rituals of cultural tourism and reinforcing the familiar visual codes through which we identify place, heritage and national identity. Yet the images are not what they seem. Jandrell photographed these scenes not in the countries represented, but in theme parks in Shenzhen, southeastern China—sites dedicated to reproducing famous global monuments at reduced scale.

This slippage between the real and the simulated lies at the heart of the work. Jandrell was fascinated by the ability of these sites to condense the world into a series of consumable attractions, offering visitors the manufactured thrill of “global travel” without leaving the park.

Through this lens, her photographs become a critical reflection on the mechanisms of modern tourism and the cultural desires that fuel it. The images reveal how globalisation shapes our engagement with place, authenticity and spectacle, and how fantasy can seamlessly inhabit the visual language of reality.

By using a photographic style associated with documentary truth, Jandrell underscores the instability of the medium’s claim to objectivity. Her work exposes how easily perception can be guided by aesthetic convention and how tourist imagery—whether encountered abroad or inside a theme park—encodes economic ambition, cultural aspiration and global interconnectedness.

These photographs form a significant part of Jandrell’s broader exploration of constructed environments, cultural performance and the politics of representation within an increasingly globalised visual landscape.