Terror of Complete Faith

'Terror of Complete Faith' by Sam Hutchinson is a collection of research images found online from various British police force's publicly available social media pages: Instagram, Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter). Many of the images highlight a bizarre trend in which police take lofi photographs of their vehicles next to sunsets and sunrise landscapes, these same motifs appearing more and more over unrelated constabularies.

In an age of public mistrust and suspicion for authority and the police, these images act as promotional online content, using traditional photographic and aesthetic choices to frame themselves in a way in which appeals emotively to a public audience they're supposed to serve. With the nature of social media's chronological format, these images appear alongside other photographs relating to police work- CCTV images of wanted 'criminals' or people with arrest warrants. The pages then contain unusual juxtapositions of functional and promotional photographs that appear side by side, when first visiting these online profiles.

'Tomb Stone Happy Slap' is a series investigating and collecting found images, objects and vernacular photography. Terror of Complete Faith is the third edition in the series.