[1] Holdsworth gained notice with photographic series such as A Machine For Living (1999) and Megalith (2002), where familiar scenes of service stations, car parks, billboards, or broadcast towers loom as godforsaken outposts, antecedent inklings of a new apocalyptic frontier.
Consumed by the exaggerated glow of neon and head lamps, the landscapes' toxic-colour intensity and blurred movements suggest atomic fulguration, illuminating industrial structures like shrines.
Holdsworth often uses extremely prolonged exposures to capture the ethereal essence of his scenes; the paradox of these images is that their hyper-acceleration is in fact slow-time aggregation: the lens' observations over minutes, hours, days, record an unnoticed seething of energy, a plausible force of infernal propulsion.
Key examples from this period are The Gregorian (2005), and Hyperborea (2006) series, which were respectively shot in Puerto Rico at the American National Astronomy and Ionosphere Centre, and in Iceland's interior, the film location of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Whether picturing a research centre in the guise of a UFO set deep within the jungle, or barren glaciers and mountains diminished beneath the spectacle of northern lights, these images re-imagine the far corners of the earth as a virtual world, fusing primordial wilderness and space-age science.