North Warning System

North Warning System is the third and final book in Donovan Wylie's Tower series, a body of work concerned with the relationship between vision and power in military architecture. Here Wylie photographs a radar installation just inside the Canadian Arctic, part of the network of short- and long-range stations built jointly by Canada and the United States in the 1950s as the Distant Early Warning Line, after long-range bombers and missiles made the Arctic frontier a vulnerable point of approach. Renamed the North Warning System in the 1990s and upgraded as northern maritime traffic increased, the station appears in Wylie's 17 photographs as an isolated, largely unmanned structure set against a bleached, near-white landscape, its automated detection apparatus standing in for the human observer entirely. The book completes a project that began with Maze/Long Kesh and Watchtowers, tracing surveillance architecture from the overtly staffed to the fully automated.