Donovan Wylie Knihy

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 then the only photographer granted official and unlimited access to the site, 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 reveals the joys and the sorrows of the whole of Ireland in a brilliant selected sequence of images of the people, the buildings, and the landscape, in short everything that makes up the unique character of this haunted but beautiful land.

This is the latest of Donovan Wylie’s books with Steidl that explore the architecture of the Northern Ireland conflict. While Wylie’s earlier publications including British Watchtowers and Maze (on Belfast’s Maze prison) document disappearing military structures, Housing Plans for the Future focuses on the legacy of architectural containment in urban areas today. Wylie took these photos during walks through a number of social-housing neighborhoods in inner-city Belfast, which look eerily similar. While the built environments at first appear benign, even mundane, sustained looking reveals how they purposely control vision and movement. Walls block vehicle access, houses are inverted to face away from neighboring communities and minimize potential antagonism, and excessive street lighting ensures visibility in what Wylie calls “a prison of sorts … a completely thought-through system of social control.” These defensive structures, built in the 1970s and ’80s and still populated today, are a powerful and largely unrecognized legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict.

Observation, whether by the human eye or the eye of a surveillance camera, requires an architectural structure that elevates the viewer into a position of advantage. The system of Iron Age hill forts, built across Britain from around 500 B.C., used natural promontories to survey the surrounding landscape; 2000 years later the British army used a similar system of watchtowers to survey the occupied territories of Northern Ireland. These high tech towers, constructed in the mid 1980s, primarily in the mountainous border region of South Armagh, were landmarks in a 30-year conflict in and over Northern Ireland, euphemistically called "The Troubles." The Towers were finally demolished between 2003 and 2007 as part of the British government's "demilitarization" program for Northern Ireland. For over a year Donovan Wylie photographed these towers, working entirely from an elevated position enabled by military helicopter, observing the observers and ensuring that their actions were not forgotten.

Photographing individual lighthouses as seen from the opposing coastlines of France and the home nations of the United Kingdom, Belfast-based photographer Donovan Wylie (born 1971) confronts the physical barriers and invitations to crossing created by the sea.Immediately following the June 2016 referendum on Brexit, Wylie began exploring ideas of family dynamics and fractured relationships as a way to understand the United Kingdom’s current state. In collaboration with the writer Chris Klatell and the Seamus Heaney Centre, this project responds to Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), which investigates the complexities of seeing, loss and the passage of time. By photographing the afterglow of distant lighthouses to process the tensions and complexities of identity and isolationism, Lighthouse simultaneously represents closeness and distance, interrogating how the isolation of the British landscape contributes to understanding national identity.

Outposts / Kandahar Province 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. Donovan Wylie was born in Belfast in 1971, where he currently teaches at the University of Ulster. Wylie is a member of Magnum Photos and his work is in major public and private collections. Steidl has published Wylie’s British Watchtowers (2007), Scrapbook (2009) and Maze (2009). Exhibitions: National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, 30 September 2011 to 19 February 2012; Le Bal, Paris, 16 September to 18 December 2011; Imperial War Museum, London, 2012

For centuries, all over the world, scrapbooks have been the most immediate and popular form of visual diary. In Northern Ireland, scrapbooks from the late 1960s through the early 1990s reflected "The Troubles," the regional conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Inspired by these highly individual collaged records of daily life--albums full of newspaper clippings, family photos and personal mementos--acclaimed Belfast-born photographer and filmmaker Donovan Wylie, in collaboration with cultural historian Timothy Prus, has created a non-sectarian version of these scrapbooks, with the benefit of hindsight, that recounts Wylie's own experience of growing up in Belfast in the 70s and 80s, as the son of a mixed marriage (his mother a Catholic, his father a Protestant), during a period when identification with one side of the religious divide was a presumed and sometimes deadly aspect of everyday life.

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 is developing throughout the north, so is military presence. In this volume, whiteness takes on the quality of a blank canvas, a metaphor for the sweep of history.