Born in 1971, Donovan Wylie is a photographer based in his native Belfast, Northern Ireland. Exploring alternative strategies for the representation of conflict, Wylie combines conceptual and typological approaches, and asks us to consider the role of photography within the contexts of preservation, memory and history.

Wylie first came to critical acclaim with Maze (Granta, 2004), a series of 80 photographs depicting the Maze prison, a site synonymous with the conflict that gripped Northern Ireland from the 1970s through the late 1990s. In 2007, Wylie returned to the Maze during its demolition and subsequently published a second volume (Steidl, 2009). Maze was shortlisted for the 2010 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize for the most significant contribution to the medium in Europe and has been widely exhibited, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Produced from 2005-14, Wylie’s Tower Series examines the mostly invisible architectures that weaves the presence of conflict into the fabric of daily life. The project spans three locations linked by long-standing imperial imperatives – Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and the Canadian Arctic – to interrogate the relationship of looking to domination and power. The individual components of the Tower Series (British Watchtowers, Outposts, and North Warning System, each published by Steidl) have been shown throughout Europe and North America and were first presented together at the Imperial War Museum, London, in 2014.

In 2010 Wylie was awarded the National Media Museum’s Fellowship Award (UK), and in 2013 he became Doran Artist in Residence at the Yale University Art Gallery. His next project, a metaphorical reading of the construction of highway interchanges in the context of American ‘promised land’ narratives, was published and exhibited at Yale in 2016-17.

In addition to photography, Wylie often works in film. He received a BAFTA in 2002 for The Train.

Wylie is a Professor in Photography at Ulster University. He has published 12 monographs and his work is featured in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London; MoMA New York; the Centre George Pompidou, Paris; the National Gallery of Canada; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.