Vision as Power, Wylie's photography exhibition

Spies like us: Donovan Wylie captures the impact of surveillance

Vision as Power, Wylie's photography exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, explores military observation as a means of control in Northern Ireland, Iraq, the Arctic and Afghanistan

Sean O'Hagan

A sign of things to come … Northern Ireland, 2006. South-east view of Golf 40, a British Army surveillance. Photograph: Donovan Wylie

Born in Belfast in 1971, Donovan Wylie grew up during the Troubles – and his experience of living in a province where military surveillance was the norm has informed his work ever since. As his current exhibition, Vision as Power at the Imperial War Museum shows, the use of surveillance in the conflict in Northern Ireland was a small-scale blueprint for what is happening now in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond in the so-called global war on terrorism.

Over the past decade, Wylie, a Magnum photographer, has become the leading visual chronicler of what he calls "the concept of vision as power in the architecture of contemporary conflict". For his 2002 series The Maze, he applied a detached style redolent of the New Topographics movement to the abandoned prison in rural County Down that once housed republican and loyalist paramilitary prisoners. His photos of the empty cells and fortified exterior exemplified the relationship between architecture and isolation, design and surveillance. In 2005, he documented British Army surveillance posts in South Armagh, just weeks before they were taken down as part of the ongoing peace process. Often shot from a helicopter, the watchtowers and their surrounding fortifications have a medieval look, but their hi-tech cameras and listening devices, which tracked civilian movement on both sides of the border, signalled the surveillance future that we all, to some degree, now inhabit.

Looking at Wylie's images of these ominous outposts amid South Armagh's rolling hills, I experienced a perverse feeling of nostalgia for those troubled times. This is the power of photography: to render the past, however grim, romantic. But here, it also relates to the fact that barely a trace of the British Army's physical presence in South Armagh remains. These images are a key record of that once provocative presence – and the fact that there are no people in them only adds to their haunting power.

Iraq, 2008. Perspective from United States army watchtower at the entrance to Al-Salam palace (also known as Camp Prosperity) showing civilian contractor office accommodation, Green Zone, Baghdad. Photograph: Donovan Wylie

From South Armagh, Donovan shifts his neutral gaze to occupied central Baghdad, where the Green Zone is anything but. Here the predominant colour is desert grey as his camera picks out a watchtower over the densely packed temporary buildings of the US forces' administration centre. At first glance, it looks like a model of a caravan park, but the trailer-like buildings are designed to protect their occupants while confining them to a small, utterly faceless environment. If JG Ballard had written futuristic war fiction, this is what his imagined landscape might have looked like.

Afghanistan, 2010. Canadian army observation post 2, Ma'sum Ghar Forward operating base, Kandahar. Photograph: Donovan Wylie

The military watchtowers on the hills and mountains around Kandahar look much like the watchtowers that once dotted South Armagh. But they are much more sophisticated in their range, and the distances surveyed are more vast and emptier. It is a shame the artist Omer Fast's film, 5,000 Feet Is the Best, about drones and their operators, is no longer on show at the Imperial War Museum, because it is the perfect accompaniment to Wylie's images. If you look closely at some of his desert landscapes, you will see the outline of white observation balloons floating in the skies over Afghanistan.

Canadian Arctic, 2013. LAB 1 Royal Canadian air force short range radar installation, north warning system, Cape Kakiviak, Torngat Mountains, Labrador. Photograph: Donovan Wylie

The final room continues Wylie's journey into surveillance beyond colour, towards a kind of whiteness that is the visual equivalent of absolute silence. His images of Canadian cyber radar stations in the Arctic are the most surprising on show. These unmanned watching posts stand at key vantage points overlooking the Hudson Strait – and they are Canada's front line of defence in the region. As global warming makes new routes viable though the Northwest Passage, the competition for untapped natural resources means that military presence in the Arctic is on the rise. In the vast whiteness, the cyber radar stations look small and isolated, and though they may resemble the other watchtowers, they are operated electronically, constantly on alert for any encroachment.This is called conflict avoidance. Once again, the only analogy is with dystopian sci-fi.

Merging documentary and art photography, Wylie's images reveal both the impact of surveillance architecture on the natural landscape and the importance of surveillance in modern conflict. At a time when we are all preoccupied with invisible online surveillance and its impact on our privacy and democracy, Vision as Power shows how military surveillance has primed us for a future that is already here: a place where we are all being watched all the time. Slowly, we are growing used to it

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/24/donovan-wylie-vision-as-power-exhibition