Explosion (2004-09), by Sarah Pickering, photographs controlled military pyrotechnic demonstrations staged for prospective police and military buyers at test and training-related sites in Kent and Lincolnshire, England.
The project developed from Pickering's earlier Public Order series after she found a pyrotechnic casing at a police training center and used institutional contacts to research the simulation industry. Begun amid British protests against the Iraq War, Explosion examines how governments and commercial suppliers rehearse violence through increasingly realistic effects. Devices imitating artillery, land mines, napalm, and fuel-air explosions become products presented during what Pickering called "shopping trips." Some manufacturers also supplied effects for war films and James Bond productions, linking military preparedness to cinematic spectacle. By photographing real detonations designed to imitate other detonations, Pickering interrogates the boundary between documentary evidence and constructed experience, as well as the unstable photographic interval between past events and anticipated threats.
Each image isolates a fireball, flash, smoke plume, or shower of sparks against open fields, low horizons, grass, and expansive skies. Operators, purchasers, soldiers, and supporting infrastructure are excluded, leaving the explosive effect suspended within an otherwise quiet rural landscape. Square and horizontal compositions accommodate clouds of differing shapes and colors, while titles such as Ground Burst No1, Napalm, Landmine, and Artillery retain the terminology of simulated ordnance. The resulting scenes can initially resemble landscape photographs before their apparent clouds register as controlled blasts.
Working within the organizers' countdowns rather than directing the effects, Pickering timed exposures during the short interval before detonation. She used a quarter-second exposure to record trajectories and the moment when each explosion reached full expression. The presentation also emphasized scale and color. Landmine (2005), for example, is a 125 × 125 cm chromogenic print, while Shot (2009) is a 120 × 140 cm C-print.
The project was first presented as Explosions at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York in 2006, followed that year by reproductions in Cabinet and inclusion in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's War Fare. Later presentations included the Photographers' Gallery in London in 2007 and Meessen De Clercq in Brussels in 2009. In 2010, the Museum of Contemporary Photography incorporated the series into Sarah Pickering: Incident Control, a 36-photograph exhibition spanning four bodies of work. Aperture simultaneously published Sarah Pickering: Explosions, Fires, and Public Order, with an essay by Karen Irvine. The Lannan Foundation acquired Artillery and Landmine, and the Brooklyn Museum displayed Landmine in In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe in 2024.
