Sarah Pickering "Explosion"

Sarah Pickering's photographs jar our sense of security and illuminate the ways in which we cope with traumatic events that are beyond our control. Her pictures depict environments and events crafted for the purpose of training policemen, firemen, and soldiers for calamities such as terrorism, civil unrest, fire, and war. By exposing the absurdity and controlled nature of these environments, Pickering's images reveal our predilection to deflect fear by trying to anticipate and plan for it--and our tendency to process it by turning it into narrative. Ultimately Pickering's photographs raise questions about the efficacy of preparedness and hint at the psychological effort needed to combat and recover from trauma--the struggle to live with the anxiety, the invisible violence, that accompanies security…Pickering's photographs are documentary, yet complicated by the fictitious, theatrical nature of the subjects she records."
Karen Irvine, excerpted from her text to Explosions, Fires, and Public Order

Sarah Pickering researches truth versus verisimilitude through the medium of photography.  Her unmanipulated images preserve actions whose causality and construction seems to be part of an alternate, but no lesser, reality. She worked with the emergency services, pyrotechnic manufacturers and the police to produce some of her most recent bodies of work.  Exhibitions include How We Are: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain 2007; New Photography in Britain, Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy, 2008; the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2009/10; Theatres of the Real, Fotomuseum, Antwerp 2009; Manipulating Reality, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2009/10. Solo exhibitions include Ffotogallery, Wales 2009,Incident Control at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago 2010 and Art and Antiquities at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, 2011. Her monograph Explosions, Fires and Public Order is published by Aperture and MoCP. Gallery Representation is with Meessen De Clercq, Brussels.

More info at: http://www.sarahpickering.co.uk/