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Dissertation - The Sublimity of Data: The Contemporary Sublime of Dan Holdsworth

By researching the work of Dan Holdsworth, I came across his many projects http://holdsworth.works/archive . His website is very well organized and it includes some texts, written by critics and journalists, also about his work in relation to the sublime. I find it very pertinent to my subject, as he is making use of very contemporary media to produce his photographic work, especially in his projects of the latest 10 years.  His archive can be divided into three periods: 90s to 2000 - 2000 to 2010 - 2010 to 2020. Each period has slightly different methods of approach to the subject he deals with, which kind of stays the same throughout. His main interest is about intervention of man over nature and he explores that mainly through landscape photography. While in the first period he mainly focuses on representing sceneries on the edges between human-made landscapes and natural ones, in the second one he focuses more on abstract and almost unnatural looking ones. The latest and more recent period of his production is purely defined by images of geological formations through the use of digital manipulated images. The entirety of his work though, rotates around the idea of uncanny and indefinite which I consider two of the basic aspects of the sublime experience. 

I therefore started putting down a structure for my dissertation: 

The introduction will be the historical part where I will place the sublime temporally and talk about the visions of Burke and Kant (and maybe some possible photographic examples). The introduction (ideally around 2000 words long) will then introduce Dan Holdsworth’s work in relation to my main subject of interest. 

The body will define D.H.’s practice through the three periods I outlined, a few examples of his projects will be described and used as examples to sustain my thesis for each of the periods. Ideally the body section will be 6000 words long and will explain carefully his evolution through time and my vision of it. 

In my conclusion I will then reflect on general points of my thesis, such as the role of the artist, an analysis of the observer mindset (which kind of audience would be more prone to be affected by a sublime experience when exposed to works such as D.H.’s?), my personal reasons of choosing this specific topic... I am planning to finish up by outlining my personal experiences in engaging with specific works of art (and photographs), reflecting on what is for me the meaning of art, life and knowledge. 

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Dissertation initial structure

After having an initial tutorial with Eugenie during Summer, where I explained to her my interest in the Sublime connected to landscape photography, she suggested to also have a look at other ways in which contemporary photography deals with the idea of sublime, for example something connected to fear of solitude, distance, space. 

I then looked into the work of Katie Paterson, a Scottish visual artist who deals with ideas such as distance, scale and space. Her practice is very different from the one I was thinking of exploring; in fact she is more of a conceptual artist, and she creates the sense of sublime by dealing with almost absract concepts and ideas. 

I found one of her works particularly interesting: A place that exists only in moonlight, 2019. 

That’s a book of short phrases meant to represent artworks which exists only in the imagination (http://katiepaterson.org/portfolio/place_that_exists/). 

The Sublime here is in the process of imagining, relating personal ideas and visualisations to poetical phrases. 

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Dissertation ideas

During lockdown and Summer, I started exploring the theme of the Sublime in within photography. 

After reading some Susan Sontag and watching many documentaries on Global issues and the pandemic itself, I grew inspired towards learning more about the many different “abilities’ of the photographic medium. From the technical aspects to the most recent uses of the medium, I started looking and researching especially landscape photography practices, which of course led me straight away to the work of Burtynsky and Gursky. 

I found out that Ed Burtynsky has basically invented a conception which is referred to as Contemporary Sublime in landscape photography. 

When researching Sublime as an aesthetic cathegory, I came across many different definitions: 

“A mark of some ordinary human limit surpassed or denied”

“A beautiful woman dying”

“wide and undetermined prospects”

“speculations of eternity and infinity”

“wildness and incommensurable”

“image at the point of dissolution — something at its climax, about to disappear forever” 

“experience of terror that “robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning”.