photo © Museum Associates / LACMA

Photo credit: Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropología. INAH-CANON.

Twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson have spent three decades photographing sites that shaped twentieth-century European history. Sea Eagle is part of a series of large-scale photographs depicting Nazi bunkers built along the coastline from Spain to Norway during World War II. The Brutalist structures survive, though they are now crumbling into the sea. Looming over the viewer and thus assuming some of the bunker’s original hateful power, this black-and-white photographic document asks whether the ideology the building represents should be fetishized, conserved, or destroyed.

“My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected, merging fact and fiction, fantasy and reality,” says Sarah Pickering. In her series Explosion, Pickering shows the English countryside violently disrupted by mines, artillery, and other weapons. On closer inspection, we see that these are small-scale simulated explosions, of the type used in military and police training exercises and special effects.