Overview

We mostly picture lighthouses in their useless state: unlit, during the day, quaint, obsolete. At dusk, across the water, they come to life—an inscrutable flash, both coming and going, marking time and distance. We wait for that light as we anticipate a lover or an invader, and then ask with Woolf’s James Ramsey: “So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing.” - Chris Klatell Lighthouse represents things near and far away, Donovan Wylie’s camera crosses channels that flicker between barriers and invitations. Following the June 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, Wylie began to photograph distant lighthouses on key procedural dates; exploring ideas of family and fractured relationships to understand the United Kingdom’s current state, and eloquently contemplating how isolation and identity shape its sense of self. Glimpsed from the opposing coastlines of France, Northern Ireland and Great Britain, the afterglow of the distant lighthouses became a way to process the tensions and complexities of identity and insularity, loneliness and love.

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9783958296398

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Author Information

Born in 1971, Donovan Wylie is a photographer based in his native Belfast. 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 is Professor of Photography at Ulster University, and his work is held in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Wylie’s books with Steidl include British Watchtowers (2007), Maze (2009), Scrapbook (2009), Outposts (2011), North Warning System (2014) and Housing Plans for the Future (2018).

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