A post on MAO and the provocative imagery (a photographer of fire?) drew me to Sarah Pickering’s show “Fire Scene” at Daniel Cooney Fine Art. I knew next to nothing about her, but as I looked over her images, I became increasingly excited. Each photograph confronted me with an elaborate detective story. The otherwise mundane scenes all feature a domestic fire in full blaze, with certain motifs reappearing in each picture: strewn clothes, empty beer cans, dirty floral patterned upholstery. But each image is unique in how it implies a specific kind of fire–a stray incendiary cigarette, an iron left on, an unattended stove. I became engrossed in these stories, awed at how they’d been elaborately set up by an obsessive mind preoccupied with every possible scenario that could burn a house down.
I should have done my research. Pickering is an interesting artist, but she isn’t that interesting. At heart she is a documentary photographer; she specializes in photographing scenarios created by emergency workers for training purposes. Everything in “Fire Scene” is built with the mania for detail and realism I observed, but not by Pickering; her role is limited to photographing it. (Her previous series, “Public Order” and “Explosion,” document areas built for riot simulations and controlled military detonation scenarios, respectively. They also offer her far more freedom for artistic decisions, as they aren’t shot in cramped quarters like “Fire Scene.”)
It’s unfair of me to judge Pickering because I misunderstood her work through ignorance, but I continue to feel that the true artistry in her photographs isn’t hers–the real credit is due to the forensics teams who built these firetraps. A wonderful analogy to this project–almost Pickering writ small–is the dollhouses of Frances Glessner Lee. Lee spent her life crafting dollhouses that contain intricate murder scenes; eventually, she used these “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” to teach detectives how to analyze crime scenes. Lee was a true obsessive, an heiress who devoted her life to murder in miniature. In 2004, there was a show and book of photographs of the Nutshell Studies by Brooklyn photographer Corinne May Botz.
In my opinion, Pickering and Botz are capitalizing off someone else’s artwork. Granted, they must have made the decisions every photograph entails (choice of perspective and composition, shutter speed, etc.), but at some point I’m not sure that’s enough. The fire scenes and Nutshell Studies are also both limited in the number of perspectives they offer–even those decisions are virtually built in to the models. The fascination of all these photographs is the artistry of someone else.
“Fire Scene” runs through March 15.
Top image © Sarah Pickering. Bottom image of Frances Glessner Lee © New York Times 2004.
