Donovan Wylie’s Tower Series examines the mostly invisible architectures that weave the promise of war into the fabric of daily life. 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 to perceive these images simply as landscapes is to miss the point. Though Wylie is often cast as a documentary photographer working in the ‘New Topographical’ mode, document and topography are both secondary concerns here. 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.

The watchtower is not, typically, an offensive weapon. It’s an anticipatory instrument, a hedge against the inevitability of future conflict. Its function is to monitor troop movements, and to observe the activity of the enemy. 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. But the stoic exterior of the modern watchtower conceals an array of high-tech surveillance equipment capable of seeing and hearing at extreme distances.