Watchtowers

These selected images from my project Watchtowers depict British military and police installations in the north of Ireland. Although the towers are highly visible throughout the North (some rise 200 feet in the air), they are conspicuously absent from tourist photos and maps. The act of making these photographs is an effort to record and examine the towers, to make them visible beyond the territorial boundaries of the North. At the same time, the process of creating these large translucent mylar prints—using a scanning-and-output system designed for reproducing engineering/architectural plans—erodes the image, rather than preserving it. By maintaining a tension between the material fact of the towers and the dissolving look of the prints, the work hints at the instability of the political system that creates and maintains these structures.