Fingers Burnt In Brighton Photography Exhibition
Sarah Pickering's Incident series was produced while she worked as Artist in Residence at the UK Fire Service College from 2006-8. The set of photographs in black and white document the spaces that are used to simulate emergencies in training exercises.
The images are of purpose-built environments that have been set on fire for Fire Officers to extinguish. The blackened spaces reveal traces of human presence – marks where fingers have dragged across surfaces and bodies have rubbed past objects. Rather than the charred piles of debris expected to be seen in a burned out building, these locations are strangely pristine. Objects are schematic and approximate as they are designed to be repeatedly burned, and have to retain a distinguishable form.
This is photography that draws attention to the photograph – the dark areas often appear where lightness should be, creating a slippage between negative and positive; the matt surface of the print echoes the burnt surface in the spaces.
In Pickering’s work the scenarios that are set up as part of training exercises can only be imagined by the viewer of the photographs. We live in a culture obssessed with simulation, preparedness and controlling and predicting the future. There is a tension between what is perceived as real and what is actually real, and how we relate to extreme events such as war and disasters (eyewitnesses often describe their experience as “like a film”). Pickering is interested in the separation of the real from the imagined.
Incident was organised in partnership with Brighton Photo Fringe 2008 and was selected through open submission. The panel included David Chandler, Director of Photoworks, Brighton; David Campany, writer and critic; and Clare Grafik, curator at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
The exhibition is in the North Gallery at Phoenix Brighton, Waterloo Place from 4th October - 6th December.
The images are of purpose-built environments that have been set on fire for Fire Officers to extinguish. The blackened spaces reveal traces of human presence – marks where fingers have dragged across surfaces and bodies have rubbed past objects. Rather than the charred piles of debris expected to be seen in a burned out building, these locations are strangely pristine. Objects are schematic and approximate as they are designed to be repeatedly burned, and have to retain a distinguishable form.
This is photography that draws attention to the photograph – the dark areas often appear where lightness should be, creating a slippage between negative and positive; the matt surface of the print echoes the burnt surface in the spaces.
In Pickering’s work the scenarios that are set up as part of training exercises can only be imagined by the viewer of the photographs. We live in a culture obssessed with simulation, preparedness and controlling and predicting the future. There is a tension between what is perceived as real and what is actually real, and how we relate to extreme events such as war and disasters (eyewitnesses often describe their experience as “like a film”). Pickering is interested in the separation of the real from the imagined.
Incident was organised in partnership with Brighton Photo Fringe 2008 and was selected through open submission. The panel included David Chandler, Director of Photoworks, Brighton; David Campany, writer and critic; and Clare Grafik, curator at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
The exhibition is in the North Gallery at Phoenix Brighton, Waterloo Place from 4th October - 6th December.