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.

Here’s Where The Story Ends

“Sarah Wishart uses large format cameras’ tilt-shift function, sometimes with props - in a process to ‘unfrighten’ spaces around London sites where she’d been advised not to walk alone. In this way she is able to tell a new story about that space in connection with her own history, to re-name both, and draw new maps, new spaces of fable. 

When people talk about dangerous places in a city, they’re often talking about spaces fixed by particular set reputations, usually spaces othered by race or class. In my experience, the people doing the warning off - have no lived experience of anything dangerous happening there - to themselves or people they know. Yet there is something in the way they want to spread that fear of the Other - to reignite the unknown space with fictional monsters. 

All the areas I’ve photographed are areas I’ve been warned off travelling through. Yet most violent acts I’ve lived through - as a survivor of violent relationships - tended to be in my own home not while walking at night in dimly lit spaces. 

All these photos were taken either at dusk or dawn, in the magical light of what the Scots call The Gloaming. Each photograph represents specific moments of violence from my own history and each photo is named against a different beginning to a fairytale taken from traditions around the world, in each case reworking of ‘Once Upon A Time’. By capturing and shifting the memory of actual violence I’ve experienced, holding it against places I have been told not to go - taking photos of spaces I am drawn to in the dark - and giving them new names I form new maps.