Look at some more images from this series on the artist’s website.
• How do Pickering’s images make you feel?
• Is Public Order an effective use of documentary or is it misleading?
This project begins with Public Order, exploring the Metropolitan Police Public Order Training Centre, a simulated urban environment where officers rehearse responses to civic unrest. Is this project an effective use of documentary or is it misleading? Are these images the best way to show what goes on behind these closed training sessions?
Some may argue this set of images are not a successful representation of the public zeitgeist of the discerning threat and the responses to them?
I believe this set is an effective use of documentary and I do not believe they are misleading, in this essay I will support my opinion with some examples.
Firstly, I believe this set of images by Pickering is an plausible use of documentary. For example there is no real attempt to hide the facts that this is a mock up of a town or city, if anything there are lots of subtle and not so subtle clues to the viewer which provoke closer examination. On closer inspection you soon get passed the thin veneer of reality. In nearly every image there is some part that slowly reveals its meaning, a missing door showing grass where a room should be or the misplaced lights on every building, the side view of a building that is just a facade. In other words, if this set was misleading it would not give you the images of behind the façade, some shots are ambiguous at best but all of them give up some part of the story being told.
Another reason I disagree that the images are misleading is, they are all taken from the same height, there are no dramatic angle changes and the lighting is very neutral throughout the set. It think this was a deliberate act of the artist, I believe this adds to documentary feel to the images.
On the other hand, the lack of what first springs to mind when one imagines riot training, police with riot shields, mock protestors and Molotov cocktails. It’s easy to see why some might say the set gives the wrong impression.
In conclusion, if you view these images in the wider context of the whole collection that these images are the first set of, Explosions, Fire and Public order, it becomes ever more apparent that these are effective documentary images.
As Pickering herself says in the forward the her book of the same name “My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected” The only fantasy involved in this set of images is the imagined scenarios the officers rehearse in the areas. Although this is not the way I would choose to portray these areas and what happens in them, it is, none the less, an compelling use of documentary.
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