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?
Make some notes in your learning log.

Pickerings images are of desolate fake urban areas where the police practice how they would deal with a violent riot situation. The images are after their training and there are no people in her work which I find quite disconcerting, the areas, although they look deprived are rather clean and clinical which also creates a sense of unease.

I don’t think Public Order is an effective piece of documentary since this training area assumes that riots only happen in urban areas when we know that they also take place in the countryside and different environments to what is described in these images.

I would imagine that since it is a training area that a documentary series of images would be more meaningful if they included people and what they use this area for, it would be less ambiguous and would not leave the viewer to construct the meaning as much as they would in this series.