At first glance the Vallée de Joux a high mountain valley in Jura Switzerland does not seem
like an especially unusual place. Yet this impression is deceptive as the British photographer
Dan Holdsworth (*1974) has shown in his photographs. Commissioned by the watchmaker Audemars
Piguet and recorded over a period of seven years in an area known as the coldest place in
Switzerland Holdsworth's pictures present the valley in romantic sublimity as if it were as
frozen in time as it is in temperature. This volume of photographs is concerned with time in
more ways than one: in the late seventeenth century the art of timekeeping came to the Vallée
de Joux. In 1875 Audemars Piguet settled here. Holdsworth's work is always informed by an
understanding of geology observations of the climate and the role of humankind on earth and
has developed a poetic visual vocabulary in which the issue of the nature of time is always
palpable.
