I have unfortunately found the experience of looking for Wylie’s work a bit frustrating: none of the links given in the course material, including those in the erratum, appear to work; the Belfast Exposed website (a project that I did not know about before now but one that is clearly of significant importance) contains very little on The Maze project, only a few images, and no examples of or extracts from the essays in the book. At least there is some more information on Wylie’s own website and there are the short videos on YouTube. These latter are at least more informative about the Watchtowers and Outposts projects.
I am trying to get hold of a cheap second-hand example of the Maze book as probably the only way of seeing this project in detail. Until I have done so I can only defer making any comments or observations on it apart from a couple of preliminary points.
The first is that this does not strike me as falling comfortably within the category of typological in so far as all of the pictures were taken within the confines of the one camp. I am not convinced that the repetition of similar views (as I understand the project includes) necessarily makes this a typological study. To that extent I feel the point is being stretched a bit to far in this section of the course material. I see this more as straight documentary and a topological survey. Ultimately though I do not think that the label that is attached to this work really matters.
As an aside, it is only now that I realise that I have driven past the site of the camp without realising it, going from Magheralin to Lisburn along the Moira road, which runs very close to the site, and visiting Hillsborough which is just to the south. This is a beautiful, verdant, and quite well off part of County Down, so it is a bit shocking to realise that the most notorious prison camp in the North was right at the heart of it.
The Watchtowers and Outposts series are clearly more straightforwardly typological. There are similarities in location and construction for each OP, in the North and Afghanistan respectively, but it is only when they are seen en masse that the similarities, and more to the point the differences, become evident and important. It seems to me that this accumulation and juxtaposition of the images is what serves to focus the work on the themes of power and control, something that is also shared by the Maze project. However I am also led to think that the power and control that these structures represent was perhaps more illusory than real.
In the case of the Maze there was certainly an exercise of power, in so far as people were held subject to a prison system, denied their freedom. Inherent in this is also an exercise of control. However it seems to me that it would be too easy to overstate the extent to which that power and control were exercised. Prisoners organised themselves within their respective parts of the camp. There were times and places within it when it was difficult for the authorities to exercise power: just think of the dirty protests and the periodic mass breakouts.
This contradiction is even more apparent with the OPs. (Again I remember seeing some of these on my first lists to the North in the 1980s, particularly in Armagh and in and around Derry.) The problem as I see it with these sort of structures is that they do not very effectively exercise power or control. Certainly they are important for intelligence gathering that can then be used in a wider context but as individual sites they neither exercise power or control over the immediate area. Rather what they do is isolate soldiers in a small, exposed, isolated, and vulnerable position and do not prevent enemy movements around or past them, whether that was IRA or Taliban. In am nay ways I therefore see these places, and these images, as monuments to military hubris. Perhaps this is a more important theme in Wylie’s work.
Moving on, I see that Sontag crops up again here and I have to confess that I do not fully understand why. Wylie’s work, in so far as it is about power and control, is not about the power or control, supposed or real, of the photographer and the photograph. What Sontag was writing about was the way that photography itself is a form of acquisition, a symbolic act of possession. These two positions are far from being the same thing.
Putting aside my general dislike of Sontag’s book I have to admit that I do find some common ground with her on this point, even if I do still think her case is somewhat overstated. It is though interesting that although Campany was thinking about the photographer as a collector he does not go into the same sort of territory of possession and control and concentrates, more appropriately in my view, on the way that process of collection, the acquisitiveness of the photographer, has an impact and effect upon the meaning and significance of the images so collected.
Incidentally, so fas as I can see the page references for Sontag given in the course material are wrong. The section on possession that I can find is in the essay The Image-World, from page 153. Pages 12 to 16 are more about the camera as weapon and means of sexual fantasy. I am not going to analyse her arguments now but simply point out what strikes me as a glaring contradiction between the two sections. The later essay explicitly argues that photography is a form of possession, albeit symbolic or surrogate. At page 13 though she says “The camera doesn’t rape or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit..”. Is this just another change of mind along the lines of that in Regarding the Pain of Others on documentary photography and compassion fatigue? Nothing wrong with that.
Sontag, S, (1979). On Photography. London: Penguin
Sontag, S, (2004). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin
https://www.belfastexposed.org/exhibitions/the-maze/
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 