Sarah Pickering Blog for Oct 19-23

Sarah Pickering caught my interest, in an unordinary way. Typically when we are drawn into photography, I would like to believe that it would be normal to say that it was because of the photo. Because of the imagery. Sarah Pickering's photographs did not initially draw me because of her use of lighting, composition, or color grid.. Sarah Pickering caught my eye because of her interest in her subject matter. I'm thankful to say that I do not like her photographs, but that I can appreciate them. She took an interest in something unique and followed it. And no matter what my reason for looking at her images, I looked. I looked and I researched and I also became intrigued with her desire to photograph such images. The images I am discussing in particular is her body of work called Explosion. The Explosion series focuses on the use denotation as a study tool for British Soldiers ( according to Aperture Magazine insight ). As Sarah puts it, “My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected, merging fact and fiction, fantasy and reality.”

Upon first glance, the images seemed far from striking. In today's society, explosions are not something that we rarely catch on video or photo. This is not an insight into something the average viewer can not see by simply googling "explosion". However, knowing her intention behind the body of work, alters how I view it. And in this case, and many others I think that an artist intentions can be just as captivating as the work. Without knowing her interest, in the fear of the explosion and the exposure that soldiers are trained to deal with, her work would be boring to me. My interest in narration and intention of the artist is very clear throughout my exploration of her work. I am trained to not only tell stories by images, but by narration due to the broadcasting background that I come from. I enjoyed this series because I can easily say that the artist purpose is necessary sometimes to enjoy the work. Not to say that it should always be completely reliant on this aspect. Photography after all is a visual art for the most part.