Sites of Preparedness

This project is a photographic investigation of environments built for tactical training and simulation: civilian driving schools, emergency-management scenarios, disaster-response grounds, and full-scale tactical "city" training zones. These places sit in an uncanny space. They are built to mimic reality with total fidelity, but they run on a compressed logic of rehearsal, control, and repetition. Working with a camera, and drone imaging where sites allow it, the project documents the architecture and material texture of these spaces to reveal how the logic of preparedness gets built into form, how practice becomes spatialized, and how the unreal becomes infrastructure. The work draws on Michel Foucault's writing on security apparatuses and Niklas Luhmann's sociology of risk, both of which frame training environments as technologies for managing an uncertain future in the present. A disaster-response mock town, a tactical driving course, a flooded rescue-training pool: each is a place where futures get rehearsed, staged, and made ready for. Photographing these sites is a way of asking how a culture prepares for what hasn't happened yet, and what that preparation looks like once it takes physical shape. Fieldwork spans a wide range of simulation landscapes across the United States, from law enforcement and fire training facilities to maritime, flight, and vocational simulators. The project builds a comparative visual field across these terrains, tracing how rehearsal takes shape spatially, organizationally, and emotionally, from the mundane to the extreme. It will result in a traveling exhibition and an accompanying photo-book pairing the images with short critical essays.