The World Pictured through the Lens of Dan Holdsworth

Culture Spy – Dan Holdsworth

British photographer Dan Holdsworth sees a different world through the lens of his camera. With his photographs, Holdsworth draws the viewer in and changes their perspectives as well. “His latest work, ‘Transmission: New Remote Earth Views’ appropriates topographical data to document the ideologically and politically loaded spaces of the American West in an entirely new way,” says Emma Lewis, art critic and writer.

Holdsworth utilizes images of the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Salt Lake City and Mount St. Helens from a vantage point unlike any before. The stark terrain presented offers meaning through absence. “What at first appear to be pure-white snow-capped mountains or perhaps the surface of the moon is, in fact, digitally rendered laser scans of the earth appropriated from U.S. Geological Survey data. These ‘Terrain models’ are used to measure climate and land change – to measure the earth and man’s effect upon it. Stripped of surface detail, there are no signifiers of natural wilderness or picturesque aesthetic, no invoking of the Romantic Sublime,” Lewis writes. Holdsworth’s photos encourage the viewer to transcend their preconceived visions of these locations and look at them through perhaps otherworldly eyes.

Holdsworth’s work is featured in numerous international collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; The UBS Collection, Zurich and London; Saatchi Collection, London.