Further to my last post on this subject I now have a copy of the book – and what a book; how did I miss this when it first came out? And how did I miss this site when driving past it given its sheer size?

Now I can see the typological elements properly. Although all of the images are from the same site I can now see that they are arranged in a way that is clearly typological: “inertias” and “steriles” (‘dead-zones’ but at least without the machine gun towers that might otherwise be associated with concentration camps); roads; yards; cells with beds and neat piles of bedding, all taken from exactly the same position.

The book is actually a bit of a jolt. I had got used, when growing up, to seeing the Maze through the prism of the dirty protests, to the inmates dressed in nothing more than a blanket (here I think of Richard Hamilton’s iconic, Christ-like painting), the walls daubed with shit, the emaciated and dying Bobby Sands, so it is a bit of a shock to the system to see the surprisingly domestic nature of, of all things, the curtains in the cells. Everything else though reminds us that this was not a holiday camp but a place of imprisonment, of oppression, of disorientation, and of violence (both inmates and guards died here).

A scary thought, looking at all of those walls and lengths of razor wire: it is so reminiscent of that great British invention, the concentration camp. We invented these god-forsaken places back during the Boer Wars. Then it was men, women and children. Here it was only men but that does not make it feel any less uncomfortable. At least we did not go the whole hog and turn them into death camps. This place is though nevertheless burdened with an uneasy ethical legacy in so far as many of the inmates were “interned”, an administrative euphemism for locked up without trial. Without question there were people incarcerated here who were, without wanting to be too coy about it, not the nicest. Nevertheless this place remains for me an indelible stain on “the rule of law”. I am glad that is is gone, but it is nevertheless important that it be remembered.

Wylie, D, (2004). The Maze. London: Granta

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