Donovan Wylie’s photographic series address violent conflicts through their architectural traces. He does not stage them as romantic ruins, but rather as rational structures of control. Prisons, watchtowers or surveillance stations underlie, however, rules of utmost secrecy, and remain mostly out of view to a media public. Thus, on the one hand, Wylie fulfils one of the vital tasks of documentary photography in confronting the audience with a difficult and foreign reality. On the other hand, he exploits the aesthetic possibilities of landscape photography, where the buildings appear as powerful agents, while individual actors are missing.
The essay analyses first via description, historic contextualisation and comparison with modern and postmodern photographic practices and theories the formal configurations in Wylie’s series. Furthermore, the discourses on the scopic regimes of visuality as tools for command and sovereignty are briefly outlined. This helps towards a better understanding of how his images can evolve such an intense impression without showing neither offenders nor victims, and a form of the sublime that is not transfiguring military action.
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