Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Dan Holdsworth

I have been looking at Dan Holdsworth's photographs quite a lot lately. His lonely depictions of commercial lots and motorways highlight the correlation between technological development and cultural isolation. Viewed under the artificial light of night, these spaces are transformed into fantastic representations permeated with ambiguity. Perhaps that is what is most affecting about Holdsworth's images; he denies the viewer the visual prompts that enable the easy classification of space. In an article that appeared in the Guardian Unlimited, the author had this to say about Holdsworth's images:

In a recent interview, Holdsworth declared his resistance to 'the idea of separation' that conventionally operates to demarcate the world into mutually exclusive poles: rural / urban, wilderness / civilisation, natural / artificial, third world / first world.
This declaration echoes a statement of intent announced four years earlier to investigate 'areas which I have termed "inter-liminal" spaces [and] in-between forms'.

For anyone who's interested you can find a great article about Holdsworth's images here, and a short, but interesting interview here.










From Top to Bottom:

Untitled 1999

Untitled 2004

Untitled 2004

Untitled 2004

All Images © Dan Holdsworth