Donovan Wylie - British Watchtowers / outposts / North Warning System / Maze - 2007-2014

DONOVAN WYLIE was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1971. He left school at sixteen and travelled around Ireland. He joined MAGNUM in 1992, and became full member in 1997.

British Watchtowers (2007)
"The idea of photography seemed to come together with the idea that this is how I could be - someone who could have one step in the world while at the same time being one step removed from it."
- Donovan Wylie - These high tech towers, constructed in the mid 1980's, primarily in the mountainous border region of South Armagh, were landmarks in a thirty year conflict in and over Northern Ireland, euphemistically called The Troubles". The Towers were finally demolished between 2000 and 2007 as part of the British government's "Demilitarization" program for Northern Ireland. For over a year Donovan Wylie photographed these towers."

Outposts / Kandahar Province (2011)
the book presents Donovan Wylie’s photographs of Forward Operating Bases constructed in the Kandahar Province of Afghanistan. From 2006 to 2011, Canada sent nearly 3,000 military personnel to Afghanistan in support of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. Serving alongside infantry and artillery, military engineers designed a network of outposts throughout the province. Built on natural promontories with multiple lines of sight, these outposts formed a protective visual architecture. They were frequently positioned on defensive locations established during earlier conflicts and represent reincarnations of past histories under new powers. The resulting images are the latest phase in Wylie’s interrogation of the architecture of modern conflict. The work was made on behalf of the Imperial War Museum in London and with generous support from the Bradford Fellowship in Photography.

North Warning System (2014)
North Warning System is Donovan Wylie’s third and final book of photographs on the theme of vision and power in military architecture and draws a close to The Tower Series. Surveying a radar station just inside the Canadian Arctic, the photographer examines the detection of invisible threats through unmanned observation posts in remote regions. The development of long-range bombers and missiles after the Second World War made Canada’s arctic frontier vulnerable to attack from the air. This forced Canada and the United States jointly to construct a matrix of short and long-range radar stations in the 1950s. Known as the Distant Early Warning Line, these stations provided electronic observation and surveillance capability across Canada’s northern frontier throughout the Cold War. In the 1990s, these stations were upgraded to form the North Warning System (NWS) which is increasingly active—as international maritime traffic develops throughout the north, so does military presence. In North Warning System, whiteness takes on the quality of a blank canvas, a metaphor for the sweep of history.

Donovan Wylie - MAZE (2009)
Between 2002 and 2003 Donovan Wylie spent almost a hundred days photographing inside the Maze prison. Through its history of protests, hunger strikes and escapes, this prison, holding both republican and loyalist prisoners, became synonymous with the Northern Ireland conflict. After the Belfast peace agreement in 1998, inmates were gradually released, but the Maze remained open. Wylie was the only photographer granted official and unlimited access to the site, and when the demolition of the prison began, symbolizing the end of the conflict in 2007, he systematically recorded its demise. The photographs which document this period are divided into four sections, each depicting a “layer” of the prison: the internal walls, the various modes of fencing, the H-blocks and, finally, the perimeter walls, which reveal the external landscape. Eventually this once-enclosed space is reintegrated with the outside world. First published in 2004 to critical acclaim, this new edition of Maze comes in three volumes: Maze 2002/03, Maze 2007/08, and The Architecture of Containment. Donovan Wylie was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1971. He is a photographer and filmmaker. In 2001 he won a BAFTA for his film The Train and has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, PhotoEspana, Madrid, and the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television, England. He is a member of Magnum Photos. Exhibition: Belfast Exposed March 25 to May 23, 2009