Colin Barras, environment and biomedical news editor
Grand Canyon B-5, 2012; courtesy Brancolini Grimaldi
Photography was a relatively new thing when Carleton Watkins visited California's Yosemite valley in 1861. His breathtaking images brought the wilderness to people who had never set foot in what was then America's remote western frontier, and captured the imaginations of art lovers. His work also became instrumental to a campaign to preserve the area. Just three years later, Abraham Lincoln would grant Yosemite protection from commercial exploitation.
Watkins's photographs are emblematic of a certain romanticised American landscape, unlike the stark new image of the valley's Sentinel Rock (left) by British artist Dan Holdsworth. Produced in collaboration with Stuart Dunning, a geologist at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, the image recreates something of the sense of remoteness in Watkins's work. Holdsworth and Dunning rendered it, and the Grand Canyon image below, on a computer using topographic data from the US Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation's Open Topography Facility. Appropriately, the data sets were gathered remotely, using aerial photography and airborne lidar observations.
Yosemite C-3, 2012; courtesy Brancolini Grimaldi
The images may not evoke the same sense of otherworldliness that 19th-century visitors to Watkins's exhibitions must have felt. But Holdsworth's work, devoid as it is of vegetation, does reveal vistas that are more reminiscent of the Martian landscape than Earth.
Dan Holdsworth's exhibition Transmission: New Remote Earth Views is at Brancolini Grimaldi in London form 23 March to 19 May.
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