Patricia Low Contemporary is pleased to present Blackout, a solo exhibition by Dan Holdsworth.
Photography is made in darkness, and darkness holds its secrets. In 1860, Mr W. Campbell, alone in his New Jersey studio, took a picture of an empty chair; when it was developed, neither he nor anyone else could explain the presence of a little boy that was clearly sat in it. In the same place, one hundred years later, the Great Northeast Blackout eclipsed an entire population; millions thought it was nuclear Armageddon. In an abyss of total infuscation the lost moments of collective amnesia, of time’s forgotten shadows, are perhaps recounted in x-ray negative: the world simulated as its own silenced and stilled skeleton, revealing a pervasive primordial presence.
Phenomenology of technology, place, and consciousness are mere starting points for Holdworth’s photographs; neither documentations nor fictions, his landscapes evoke haunting evidence, a kind of empirical knowledge that extends beyond immediate cognition. For Holdsworth, photography, with its technical precision and inherent wonder, its malleable power of authority, is treated as a challenge to limitation’s excess. Taking up to a year to produce, edited through both analogue and digital processes, Holdsworth’s photographs tease out the invisible ‘truths’ imperceptible to the naked eye. His fantastical images aren’t elaborate deceptions, but rather astounding articulations of what is actually caught on film.
