RCA graduate Sarah Pickering made her mark with her Public Order work completed in 2005. This depicted Metropolitan Police training centres in simulated urban environments made all the more eerie for their lack of human figures. The pictures took viewers beyond the trolley-strewn streets to reveal what lies beyond the grey-breezeblock façades. And in one particularly telling image, she shows a store room stacked with visored riot helmets, seen through a door marked above with the words "VIOLENT MAN" in blood-red paint.

Explosions, Fires and Public Order published by Aperture adds a further three series to this ongoing theme. Explosions documents controlled detonations by the British military, designed to add realism to their training exercises. The pictures feature smoke, debris and fireballs set against flat landscapes, but like all Pickering's pictures, they look more like a scene from an arthouse film, isolated within an untold narrative.

The next two series were taken during her spell as artist-in-residence at the UK Fire Service College in 2007 and '08. Fire Scene focuses on the controlled blazes used for training and analysis at the college's very realistic-looking home interiors. And in Incident her photographs (beautifully printed for show at Brighton Photo Fringe two years ago) describe the aftermath of these fires in dark, flat, black-on-black monotone.

Pickering's photos explore the relationship between art and truth through the reproduction of appearances. They ask us to ask questions. Is photography a purely representational form of art? Should we revise our judgement of a photograph after learning it is a fake? If evidence is doctored before and after we press the shutter, then what is truth?

Their flatness has resulted in Pickering's pictures often being cited in relation to the Düsseldorf School. But while her images share the same distanced objectivity of Thomas Ruff's early work, for example, hers are not typologies because she's less interested in finding common, ideal forms. Yes, she is asking us to explore an ideal - a "state of normality", whatever that is, but her photos reveal a curious probing into what constitutes the aesthetics of constructed environments.

Ruff's early pictures touched on academic debates of the 1970s such as reader-response theory, but Pickering, along with other reality probers - Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and the partnership Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin - are tapping away at the question, "if this scene is a construction of reality, then this photograph is also a construction of reality".

The quote from Baudrillard at the beginning of the book, making visible "the invisible violence of security", gives a sense of intellectual direction to Pickering's work. (Why do photographers always seem to quote Baudrillard, but not Nietzsche?) Ultimately, Pickering's intellectual curiosity is a little too rational and sober for me. Rather than becoming immersed, the viewer is held at a distance.