Sarah Pickering

Landmine, 2005
Napalm, 2005

Artillery, 2005

Flicks Nightclub 2004

Dickens, High Street 2003

Semi Detached 2003

Pickering's work seemingly dances on a fine line between reality and construction. Upon first glance it is not outright obvious if her work has been altered in post-production or not, and this is especially true for the "Public Order" series shown second here. The images are extremely stagnant and carefully composed with each shot containing some sort of opening to another area. These openings become a gray area where it becomes difficult to determine fiction from fact. In reality her images are actually documents of simulation, with the only manufacturing being done in the scene itself. Everything you see in her photos has been created by someone for for testing or demonstrating purposes. Pickering photographs illusion, events that could be misinterpreted as real situation, when the reality is that it is all 'fake.'

Her work to me is an interesting comment on the digital photoshop world itself. Now days we seem to define fake and real as if it was photoshoped to the point where the integrity and validity of the image has been altered. These images however contain completely fabricated content but have no real post-production alterations made to them, so whats more real? You can't really call these images 'reality' because they depict a simulation, a forced a event or space. But are they more real then if she would have photoshoped in other rooms or explosions? It is this play on our desire to stamp every image as true or photoshoped that I think is truly awesome about this work. I love questions!