3/15/2023 0 Comments Dew lin ephotos 1950s![]() ![]() The Americans had faced the same problem in Alaska in the early 1890s. Alert and unsettlingly anthropomorphic, they are ciphers to the immanence of conflict emblems of war as a state of mind and a state of being.1935 Reindeer Herding in the Northwest Territoriesĭuring the early 1920s the Federal Government began receiving disturbing reports, apparently based on actual field observations, that populations of northern caribou were in steep decline and that the Inuvialuit of the western Arctic and Inuit further east would soon be starving. The penultimate image of the tower, gazing out over the pack ice in the Hudson Strait, recalls Romantic landscape painting’s fondest idiom, the Rückenfigur – a human figure standing in the foreground of the image with its back to the viewer, inviting us to imagine ourselves as part of the landscape at the same time as it emphasizes our isolation from it.īuilt out of utilitarian materials – concrete, steel, sandbags, plastic – the watchtowers in Wylie’s photographs appear almost fragile, small-scaled against the stretch of the terrain under their gaze. Approached by helicopter, the tower is barely visible in a bank of low cloud, which clears as Wylie circles the station. The third book in Wylie’s trilogy comprises 17 aerial photographs of a single radar station in northern Labrador, Canada. In the 1990s, the DEW line was replaced with the North Warning System. Time seems suspended in these images, which reach back into a Biblical past marked by internecine struggle, and look forward into a parched and paranoid future. Low mud-brick buildings mimic the forms of more recent military installations. In the distance, groups of people gather, military vehicles move along the road, an explosion sends up a column of smoke. In Kandahar, Canadian army observation posts nestle in the serrated outlines of the hills, looking out over a vast sand-hued landscape bathed in golden light. But for the residents of South Armagh, it was enough simply to know that they were there. In many of Wylie’s images, the towers – known as ‘sangars’ by the British Army – are barely visible. During the Troubles, the area was largely free of the sectarian violence that plagued other regions, but it was the site of repeated confrontations between the British Army and the IRA. Sheep graze on the hillsides, and the towns appear mostly empty of people. The rural landscape lies green and still under implacable grey skies. Shot prior to the demolition of the towers in 2007, Wylie’s images of South Armagh are alive with tension. Outposts 2011 Donovan Wylie and courtesy of SteidlĪlert and unsettlingly anthropomorphic, watchtowers are ciphers to the immanence of conflict emblems of war as a state of mind and a state of being. But the stoic exterior of the modern watchtower conceals an array of high-tech surveillance equipment capable of seeing and hearing at extreme distances. Unornamented and bluntly functional, the watchtower is the purest kind of modernist architecture, refusing any kind of signification apart from the terse expression of power. Its function is to monitor troop movements, and to observe the activity of the enemy. It’s an anticipatory instrument, a hedge against the inevitability of future conflict. The watchtower is not, typically, an offensive weapon. The photographs in The Tower Series are about what can’t be seen, and about the paranoia, loneliness, and isolation that haunt our efforts to see it. Though Wylie is often cast as a documentary photographer working in the ‘New Topographical’ mode, document and topography are both secondary concerns here. But to perceive these images simply as landscapes is to miss the point. It spans three places – Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and the Canadian Arctic – and works across three distinct landscape idioms – the pastoral, the sublime, and the romantic. But the name also held the terrifying prospect of an invisible threat, remote but poised to strike.ĭonovan Wylie’s Tower Series examines the mostly invisible architectures that weave the promise of war into the fabric of daily life. The acronym conjured up an image of vigilant water droplets, a shimmering circlet at the top of the world. As a child growing up in Canada, the DEW line was a source of both comfort and dread. Its job was to detect Soviet missiles approaching North America from the polar regions. It’s an anticipatory instrument, a hedge against the inevitability of future conflict.īuilt in the 1950s, the Distant Early Warning line, or DEW line, was a system of radar stations stretching across northern Canada from Alaska to Greenland. British Watchtowers 2007 Donovan Wylie and courtesy of Steidl ![]()
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