GEOGRAPHIES OF FEAR

Geographies of Fear is a photography show uncovering perceived notions of civic threat, revealing how we are directed to experience place and indicating how harmful encounters might be remapped.

“Each historical period produces the kind of public space, and therefore public life, which reflects the political realities of the time.” Anna Minton, Ground Control

The concept of ‘here are lions’ used from Roman time, or ‘terra incognita’ tells us that the unmapped space is something to be terrified of and was the inscription used historically by nautical cartographers to indicate a space of uncharted water, often on the edges of maps. If the mapmakers had no information as to what might be there, they filled it with ship-devouring kraken, huge whales, Neptune on the warpath, or viciously gigantic mermaids. This practice suggests that the unknown place is both somewhere to be terrified of as well as being filled with the potential of the fantastic.

Having access to or knowing the space doesn’t make it any less terrifying, arguably it is such an anxiety that causes the UK to have one in three of the world’s CCTV cameras on our streets, the paranoia which leads to the construction of different but invisible ways to affect our movements around urban spaces.

We seem to live in an age of fear, where we are prey to the state’s heightened focus on those outside and those inside borders. Place making now, rather than freeing us of the space of the monster, now seems to be set on reintroducing the monsters into all mapped spaces.

This exhibition showcases how three photographers use different photographic processes to look at three different, fearful aspects concerning space. Each artist is looking at different anxieties at play through the use of public space in the world today.

Anthony Carr uses pinhole cameras to mimic the experience of CCTV cameras that see everything but show nothing; Nicholas Middleton uses stereoscopic photography to highlight aspects of the built environment designed to affect the movement and behaviour of people; and Sarah Wishart uses a large format camera and props in spaces around the London that she had been advised not to walk through at night, to tell a new story about that space, to re-name it into the space of fable.