Dan Holdsworth: Blackout

‘Blackout’ (2011) is a series of images by Dan Holdsworth taken of Icelands mountainous region which is home to it’s receding glaciers. The images are presented in negative reminiscent of a radiograph which creates a sense of the scientific and investigative. The white mountains against the deep black ‘nothingness’ sky have an eerie beauty that is otherworldly, almost alien in nature and could be of another planet or perhaps the moon.

The particular landscape Holdsworth has chosen to photograph so eloquently is that of Iceland, home to the now infamous Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano which managed to cause one of the biggest blackouts in European skies for a long, long time. Iceland you see, is being slowly torn in two by a pair of separating tectonic plates and the landscape this creates not only opens what appear to be the gates of Hell in some of Holdsworth’s images, but also the peacefully awesome pathways of Valhalla.

(SMBH | SuperMassiveBlackHole, 2020)

The mountains have a sculptural element, they could be carved in alabaster. There is a sense of the sublime in that the images seem to be suspended in time and yet represent thousands of years of geological processes. There is terror. The volcano could erupt at any time and the environmental impact of the receding glaciers are threatening to our existence on this planet. The power and beauty of nature is very much depicted here.

At first I wondered if the images had been taken in infra-red, something I experimented with in a previous unit. The colour has been inverted in post-processing which is food for thought for my next assignment. I’m very keen on this kind of aesthetic.

References and Bibliography

1. Danholdsworth.com. (2020). Dan Holdsworth: Blackout. [online] Available at: http://www.danholdsworth.com/works/blackout/4/ [Accessed 02 March. 2020].
2. Vandenbrouck, M. (2020). Dan Holdsworth’s dizzyingly beautiful photographs on show in Southampton | Apollo Magazine. [online] Apollo Magazine. Available at: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/dan-holdsworths-dizzyingly-beautiful-photographs-on-show-in-southampton/ [Accessed 2 Mar. 2020].
3. Danholdsworth.com. (2020). Dan Holdsworth, Blackout, review text [online] Available at: https://www.danholdsworth.com/texts/danholdsworthartreviewfeature/ [Accessed 2 Mar. 2020].
4. SMBH | SuperMassiveBlackHole. (2020). Dan Holdsworth: The View From On High. [online] Available at: http://smbhmag.com/dan-holdsworth-blackout/ [Accessed 2 Mar. 2020].