For Wylie the project is a personal statement as well as a documentary record. 'I grew up with the prison in the background and the architecture and the Troubles were well known to me,’ Wylie tells me. 'The building dominated everyone’s life and was the epicentre.’
The sinister presence of the Maze, holding both loyalist and republican prisoners, is described by Dr Louise Purbrick, senior lecturer in the history of art and design at the University of Brighton, in a text to Wylie’s original portfolio. She writes, 'Opened in 1976, with its construction completed the following year, it was built as a modern fortress with high walls and watchtowers, surrounding eight identical cell blocks in the shape of an H. These “H” blocks became synonymous with the political conflict in Northern Ireland, and the Maze became one of its most potent symbols.’
She quotes the Chief Inspector of Prisons, James Hennessy, who in 1984 summarised the Maze’s population as 'unique’, consisting almost entirely of 'prisoners convicted of offences connected with terrorist activities, united in their determination to be treated as political prisoners, resisting prison discipline… even if it means starving themselves to death,’ as in the case of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
The association between the architecture and the regime it contained was what gripped Wylie. His shots, produced with a 5x4 plate camera, were taken during the period when the prison was closing ( the last prisoner left in 2000). After the first six months’ shooting, Wylie gave up, believing that 'photography is a limiting medium and what you get isn’t necessarily what you want to say’. He then returned to the site and after a while the approach became clear. In fact, he says, 'the work happened on the last four days of shooting.’
A lead was his recognition that 'the trick of the project was to try to understand the psychology of it. The building is a hybrid between a civilian prison and a military prison, but the whole thing is a machine and every part in it is a component and it all works together. Once you understand it as a machine, you can deconstruct it as a machine, photographically. Then you fully understand the shape of it, why it doesn’t have any steps, why there are so many layers to it, why it is so uniform.’
Nothing is more symbolically uniform than the sky caught in the exterior shots, depicting the long tracks around the blocks; it took a couple of hours to walk them. Wylie recalls, 'It needed four attempts all done in one run to get the grey-blue consistency I was looking for. It took a lot of waiting.’ In the images, cells are shown with beds made up in a state of readiness. The chintz curtains strike a scary note – an anachronistically homely touch amid the clinical surroundings. 'Half the prison was closed,’ Wylie says, 'and the images suggest that you don’t know whether it is closing or opening.’
- The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, for which 'The Daily Telegraph’ is media sponsor, is at the Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1, from February 12 to April 18.
- The winner will be announced on March 17. Prints by the artists will be on sale. There will be a special Telegraph readers’ evening on Tuesday March 2. To apply for a pair of tickets, email promo@photonet.org.uk with 'Readers’ evening’ in the subject header
Next week: Sophie Ristelhueber