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A shining light
Brighton-based Photoworks commissions and publishes contemporary photography, the most recent example to have appeared in Ag being Nigel Green’s Dungeness project (Ag39). The organisation also produces a biannual journal (details at www.photoworksuk.org). The third and fourth books in the Photoworks Monograph series come from Dan Holdsworth and Sophy Rickett and have been produced with support from Arts Council England, as were the first two by Gareth McConnell and Nigel Shafran. Holdsworth has built up a reputation in recent years for his colour landscape photography, much of which makes greater use of saturated hues and dramatic lighting than is strictly fashionable. Since the late 1990s he has exhibited nationally and abroad: although many of his chosen locations follow popular themes such as motorways, car parks, industrial installations, despoiled landscapes, he renders them with a palette far richer than is familiar to his contemporaries. Sometimes the saturation comes from underexposure, often it is the result of shooting at night under artificial light. For those of us a little weary of the dreary, muted, washed-out tones - de rigueur among the fin de siecle in-crowd [too many French clichés - Ed] - this makes a refreshing change, and seems to set the places more firmly in modern times. A welcome break from the bleak post-Soviet distopias to which we are becoming inured.
Dan Holdsworth, a Photoworks Monograph co-published with Steidl, £19.99 hardback, ISBN 3-86521-087-2.
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