Dan Holdsworth (B. 1974)

Images from Dan Holdsworth’s series The Gregorian from 2005 were taken at the Arecibo Space Telescope at the American National Astronomy and Ionosphere Centre in Puerto Rico. Photographed at night and using long exposures of up to four hours, the photographs give the telescope and its remote setting a surreal mystery that is a response to the time of day and different lunar conditions. The telescope, which lies deep within the jungle, is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope and is capable of picking up the faintest radio waves from furthest reaches of space, some of which have taken 100 million years to reach the Earth. It then translates these signals into information that is then used to track asteroids, the formation of new planets and provide a description of the outer limits of the known universe.

Led by a personal response to the environment, Holdsworth’s photographs reveal the world in way that the human eye finds difficult to register in the immediate moment. ‘One of my great interests with photography,’ Holdsworth has said, ‘is the nature of its process which is by default of the interaction of light with a light sensitive receptor, a process innately defined by light, and so by time. Light and time in a photograph are combined in one inseparable material. It seems to me that current human culture has very great/grave difficulty in processing concepts of time, while global capitalism deals in a consumption of time that does not allow for a wider ecology of time to be explored. As such we are bound in a system in which the growth of scientific knowledge and acceleration of global capitalism appear to be on a collision course. Photography…has the capacity to communicate ideas about human relations to time which in the context of our current cultural climate I believe give a great source for people to rethink their relationships with nature.’ (D. Holdsworth, quoted at https://www.landscapestories.net/interviews/63-2013-dan-holdsworth?lang=en [accessed 18 December 2013])