Look at some more images from this series on the artists website.

• How do Pickering’s images make you feel
• Is Public Order an effective use of documentary or is it misleading

Initially the images made me feel sad that we live in a society where we need these kinds of training facilities and also at the same time pleased and relieved that we go to so much trouble to try an ensure that our forces are as prepared as possible before being faced with the real thing.

If I were viewing the images without context I would find them a bit strange, desolate and perhaps a bit disturbing. They would certainly be a bit confusing and one might get the feeling that they were perhaps stage settings for a film or TV drama.

I find it hard to judge if Public Order is an effective use of documentary or if it even is “documentary” defined as “using pictures or interviews with people involved in real events to provide a factual report on a particular subject” These images are far more subtle than that, allowing us to see something more than just the facts. In an interview with Susan Bright, writer and curator of photography Pickering says,

I didn’t want to include the petrol bombs and the missiles and all the action that takes there on a daily basis, but I did actually start off by photographing that, and realized that there was so much more power and the sense of latent violence that’s in the work is so much more evocative than trying to get some action shots.Pickering (2010)

I feel that this type of documentary art is powerful and says so much more in many cases than images of events themselves. When viewing images of the events the viewer can get caught up in detail without seeing the wider issues. In Pickering’s images the wider issues are there to be found within the mind of the viewer. The worry of what might happen, the fact that for some the worst will happen and people are training for that eventuality. In the same interview with Susan Bright, she was thinking,

how people prepare for the worst case scenarios. Pickering (2010)

It is “staged” and “real” all at the same time. It is a staged impoverished town built to assist in the training of people to react to real events.  The town is a real training environment even if it’s not a real town.  In the same interview with Susan Bright she also talks about a sense of realism interrupted by the real when she talked about how the officers stopping for lunch during hostage training.

Bibliography

 Pickering, S., 2010. Sarah Pickering In Conversation With Susan Bright Introduction And Public Order Series.
At: https://susanbright.net/In-conversation-with-Sarah-Pickering
[Accessed 9 October 2020].