Dan Holdsworth Livres

At first glance, the Vallée de Joux, a high mountain valley in Jura, Switzerland, does not seem like an especially unusual place. Yet this impression is deceptive, as the British photographer Dan Holdsworth (*1974) has shown in his photographs. Commissioned by the watchmaker Audemars Piguet and recorded over a period of seven years in an area known as the coldest place in Switzerland, Holdsworth’s pictures present the valley in romantic sublimity, as if it were as frozen in time as it is in temperature. This volume of photographs is concerned with time in more ways than one: in the late seventeenth century, the art of timekeeping came to the Vallée de Joux. In 1875, Audemars Piguet settled here. Holdsworth’s work is always informed by an understanding of geology, observations of the climate, and the role of humankind on earth, and has developed a poetic visual vocabulary in which the issue of the nature of time is always palpable.

Office buildings after work, car parks at night, and deserted motorway such moments and subjects are preserved through the photographs of British artist, Dan Holdsworth. Since the late 90s, Holdsworth has developed a reputation as one of the most innovative British photographers currently working with landscapes. His early series concentrated on the quiet moments in everyday spaces and such subjects are the basis for Holdsworth's more recent examination of technology and isolation in modern society. Over the past few years he has traveled internationally, studying the areas where technology and architecture are representative of an accelerated economic world at their most removed and alien. The photographs are silent and iconic witnesses of our world. Collected here are 80 beautifully reproduced images spanning more than a decade of Holdworth's career.