A glimpse of Dan Holdsworth's project "Continuous Topography".

Dan Holdsworth’s series of large-scale moving image and photographic works, Continuous Topography, premiered at Art Basel in Basel in 2016. To create Continuous Topography, Holdsworth spent months undertaking fieldwork in the Vallée de Joux, working with drones, advanced digital mapping data and specially configured computer programmes that photographed the landscape with military precision.

Each work in the series takes the form of three-dimensional models of the landscape, revealing the surfaces of the valley with impeccable precision. Through capturing the epic timescales required for the evolution of the area’s unique geological formations, Holdsworth’s photography invites the viewer to reimage their relationship with time and space.

Portrait of Dan Holdsworth.

British artist Dan Holdsworth (b. 1974) has built his career making pictures of landscapes. Using various techniques and technologies, from long exposures to cutting-edge programmes that calculate spatial coordinates, he creates images that reflect the play of light—whether solar, lunar, stellar, or man-made—or represent the infinite expanses of geological time. While Holdsworth’s subjects range from glaciers to shopping centres, the investigation of place has been his constant theme.

 

Holdsworth studied photography at the University of the Arts’ London College of Communication. His work has been collected by and shown in leading museums around the world, such as Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, among many others. In 2015, he won the Arts Council of England Award.