Dan Holdsworth (born 1974) is one of the Britain’s most prominent art photographers, represented in public collections across the UK.
His overall practice can be defined by the creation of ‘psychological landscapes’. After having explored scenes of everyday life in suburban and industrial contexts, since the mid-2000s, Holdsworth has turned to otherworldly landscapes. These are characterised by a connection between landscapes and sciences (astronomy, geology…) that borrow from the aesthetic of the romantic sublime, traditional photographic techniques and high-tech data recording.

In 2006, Holdsworth was invited to show at the NMM as part of the contemporary arts programme ‘New Visions’. His solo exhibition ‘At the Edge of Space part 1-3’ (8 June 2006 – 7 January 2007), combined photographs from two existing bodies of work alongside a new series specially commissioned by the NMM. The latter was the ‘Hyperborea’ series, shot in Iceland and Norway in 2006, and to which this photograph belongs.

In the series, the pastel veils of glowing aurorae, sometimes punctuated by the trails of satellites, contrast with the frozen land below, where feeble traces of human presence (vehicle tracks, artificial light or diminutive human habitat) bring a touch of reality to a fantasy scene. The long exposure reveals the world around us in a way that the human eye could never capture: it turns the desolate landscape into the eerie set of a science-fiction movie, or recalls the unearthly moonscape as captured by the Apollo missions in the late 1960s – early 1970s.

Holdsworth has described the extreme conditions of shooting for hours in December, alone in his frozen surroundings, at a time of the year when the sun never rises. His series materialises as a witness statement, akin to those produced by polar explorers. It also affected the artist on a profound level. In his words, ‘the experience of photographing the Northern Lights felt like I was entering a different time space. Whilst being alone in the arctic wilderness, I became aware of the cycle of the Earth. The lights are a visual representation of everything that we cannot see but which goes on around us all the time. It’s like being given a glimpse of the rhythm of the universe.’