Spies like us: Donovan Wylie captures the impact of surveillance

A sign of things to come … Northern Ireland, 2006. South-east view of Golf 40, a British Army surveillance. Photograph: Donovan Wylie

Born in Belfast in 1971, Donovan Wylie grew up during the Troubles – and his experience of living in a province where military surveillance was the norm has informed his work ever since. As his current exhibition, Vision as Power at the Imperial War Museum shows, the use of surveillance in the conflict in Northern Ireland was a small-scale blueprint for what is happening now in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond in the so-called global war on terrorism.

Over the past decade, Wylie, a Magnum photographer, has become the leading visual chronicler of what he calls "the concept of vision as power in the architecture of contemporary conflict". For his 2002 series The Maze, he applied a detached style redolent of the New Topographics movement to the abandoned prison in rural County Down that once housed republican and loyalist paramilitary prisoners. His photos of the empty cells and fortified exterior exemplified the relationship between architecture and isolation, design and surveillance. In 2005, he documented British Army surveillance posts in South Armagh, just weeks before they were taken down as part of the ongoing peace process. Often shot from a helicopter, the watchtowers and their surrounding fortifications have a medieval look, but their hi-tech cameras and listening devices, which tracked civilian movement on both sides of the border, signalled the surveillance future that we all, to some degree, now inhabit.

Looking at Wylie's images of these ominous outposts amid South Armagh's rolling hills, I experienced a perverse feeling of nostalgia for those troubled times. This is the power of photography: to render the past, however grim, romantic. But here, it also relates to the fact that barely a trace of the British Army's physical presence in South Armagh remains. These images are a key record of that once provocative presence – and the fact that there are no people in them only adds to their haunting power.

Iraq, 2008. Perspective from United States Army watchtower at the entrance to Al-Salam Palace
Iraq, 2008. Perspective from United States army watchtower at the entrance to Al-Salam palace (also known as Camp Prosperity) showing civilian contractor office accommodation, Green Zone, Baghdad. Photograph: Donovan Wylie
From South Armagh, Donovan shifts his neutral gaze to occupied central Baghdad, where the Green Zone is anything but. Here the predominant colour is desert grey as his camera picks out a watchtower over the densely packed temporary buildings of the US forces' administration centre. At first glance, it looks like a model of a caravan park, but the trailer-like buildings are designed to protect their occupants while confining them to a small, utterly faceless environment. If JG Ballard had written futuristic war fiction, this is what his imagined landscape might have looked like.

Afghanistan, 2010. Canadian army observation post 2, Ma'sum Ghar Forward operating base, Kandahar
Afghanistan, 2010. Canadian army observation post 2, Ma'sum Ghar Forward operating base, Kandahar. Photograph: Donovan Wylie
The military watchtowers on the hills and mountains around Kandahar look much like the watchtowers that once dotted South Armagh. But they are much more sophisticated in their range, and the distances surveyed are more vast and emptier. It is a shame the artist Omer Fast's film,
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