Sarah Pickering

I've recently discovered the work of Sarah Pickering. Specifically, via her website (http://www.sarahpickering.co.uk/index.html) I've viewed her works: Public Order, Incident, Explosion, and Fire Scene. Lately I've been feeling a sort a poverty when it comes to visual and conceptual inspiration in photography.  Anyway, what I've discovered in Sarah Pickering's works is formal and conceptual poetry. I'll talk specifically about my experience in viewing her series 'Public Order'. Initially, I was struck by her muted blending of color and shape in what initially appeared to me to be an exploration of a sort of formal order found in the city. Blues, greens, reds, and yellows worked against the cement gray of the brick and over cast sky. As I progressed through the series certain themes began to put themselves together. There were no people, the city was empty. Streets were barricaded and the cement walls showed signs of past fires, maybe explosions. But again everything feels calm. The fires and the barricades are tidy. And then there is a change that leads us to understanding the unnerving serenity of this scape. While there were earlier signs, my initial understanding began with the image 'High Street, 2002'. The walls of the city, are in fact facades. No real buildings. The sense of familiar is completely displaced and in that there is a surreal and delightful point of confusion. Public Order is  series of photographs from a police training ground outside of London that trains officers to control civil unrest in a replicated city. What Pickering creates is documentation that toys around with the idea of fiction. Along with our changing understanding of what the city is and from seeming fact to fiction,  our understanding of 'Public Order' changes as well. I'm hesitant to search for meaning outside of this surreal feeling of detachment she creates in her work. It could certainly be read as revealing new ideas of what what public order means and the means that go into keeping public order.