MK:

Arguably the greatest paradigm shift in photography to date has been the advent of the digital age, and with it, both the proliferation and the dematerialisation of the photographic image; and the demise of the object and rise of the data file. Your work seems to take account of these new phenomena in a more explicit way than other artists working in the same field. What do you think the digital age means for photography as a medium – or as a set of media?

DH:

The first and most important thing about photography is that it never been singular. The second is that it has always been an evolving technology, or rather is an amalgam of technologies in the plural, as every part of photographic production has been technological. Photographers and artists have necessarily adapted to these new technologies. The third is that photographic images have, with the exception of Daguerreotypes and direct prints, always existed in multiple places at once. Photography isn’t a medium, it’s a set of media. Photographs have always been framed objects and made for exhibition, books, archives and libraries. If we feel that photographs are being ‘dematerialised’ by being seen online, and should be seen as virtual objects, then they still exist as parts of archives. It’s just those archives are in giant warehouses full of servers and digital memory. There are two differences. Images that exist purely as data might last forever and never degrade because of digital archiving. Objects always have a lifespan, and degrade over time.

Of course digital artefacts stay the same forever – up until the point their support-structure of an operating system disappears. Perhaps the real breakthrough is that images taken on digital cameras today are already attached to all kinds of data. They exist in conjunction with GPS co-ordinates and other metadata. Those kinds of data are enabled by the military, as well as by the academy and scientific endeavour. The embedding of images in those categories and co-ordinates was something that we didn’t foresee, twenty years ago. What you call the ‘embedded image’ is one that is attached to other information, like GPS information about where the image was made. GPS provides an anchoring in ‘real’ space, with the co-ordinates or name of a specific location. From this point on, every photograph becomes a form of mapping.

MK:

Your career has spanned this critical period in the evolution, or revolution of photographic processes. As well as product – be it physical object or data file – the advent of digital imaging has revolutionised artists’ and photographers’ working processes. You started out at a time when chemical processing was in effect the only means of making a photograph. Now, there are hardly any analogue printers left even in large cities. How do you explore its impact in your work?

DH:

I see the big change from chemical to data processes as a cumulative one, even though its effects seemed to be felt all at once. What I’m in interested in are what kind of new ‘spaces’ for reading images those changes allow. On the one hand, new technologies allow for a different ‘archaeology of the image’. They reorder the entire history of photographic production. That could yet lead to a whole new way of seeing. On the other hand, the pace and cumulative momentum of these technological changes invites people to imagine the near future rather than rethink our ‘heritage’. Thinking about what is still forthcoming, and what will be possible technically and creatively, has preoccupied people greatly. The imagined trajectory of our medium, rather than what they are capable of right now, is acting to reshape what is being made. Looking both back and forward in new ways is what has created this ‘space’ in which a whole new conversation about the languages of photography is possible. The single most important development, to me, is that a photographic object is no longer seen as being just the passive recipient of our gaze. There is an expectation that an image can generate a two-way relationship with us. That seems a fundamental shift. We might say that a photograph is no longer ‘flat’. It doesn’t have to be a picture of something else. The expectation is that we are transmitting to it, so that there is an active, feedback loop between us and it. We recognise that objects have their own agency in the world, and so a dialogue between their agency and ours is essential.

MK:

The language you are using to describe what a photograph is seems to be parallel to that in digital communication systems. Most people are used to having ‘relationships’ with digital images, in which we interact with and change them, clicking, typing and swiping to navigate through a complex virtual space using a machine. One might say that in this kind of interface, both parties can be changed by the encounter.

DH:

The metaphor of ‘interfaces’ is very productive. It does describe what a photographic object has become, as a space for a kind of looking, where looking is interactive and two-way. Another metaphor might be the image as a sort of sub-structure. As one that can be reconstructed and aligned with the structure of the image bank that people carry around in their imaginations. That presupposes, I think correctly, that people ‘build’ their visual world, actively, rather than it pre-existing, and that it can be rebuilt and remodelled.

The very idea of what digital imaging is and could be has been my starting point with recent work. It’s made me reconsider the very roles that photography plays, and the history of reading its images. Once you do that, you have to also think in terms of an archaeology of photographic processes. I’ve been looking at the histories of how landscape images were made, in particular. Their conditions of production were highly specific, but their uses were multiple. The American Survey photographers in the nineteenth century were at the absolute frontier of technology, as well as working at the ‘frontiers’ of human habitation. They were commissioned for mapping surveys by mining and railroad companies, and by the US government to gather data for scientific research. Yet they exhibited their photographs in art galleries; and they were used to attract tourists and investors; and even used by the pioneers of the early ecology movement like John Muir, to promote the preservation of the ‘wilderness’. The crucial thing is that their work was able to intersect with different but inter-related contexts because they were at the edge of science and art. The latest scientific advances were what made their work possible.

I see their work as parallel to my own; their work allowed me to rediscover ideas about photography that have relevance to our contemporary world in which photography is information and data. We have a new frontier of the image again. The new frontier is what can be made visible, and known. Photography creates knowledge: knowledge about the world, and about perception itself. I see the frontier of our time as a neurological one, one in which the basis of perception is at stake. I see the American Survey photographers’ ideas, and their pioneering of new possibilities of perception, and of new views, as entirely contemporary in that sense: they allowed their peers to see in a new way. In our time, it’s not just that technological developments have accelerated; it’s that there has been a concentrated accumulation of them. We are at a juncture, now, where we have to come to terms with an entirely new kind of perception.

MK:

But what’s unusual about this radically new kind of perception is precisely that it doesn’t feel new or radical at all. These technologies have become like second nature, have become routine, especially to young people, who get called ‘digital natives’. Perhaps unusually for a complex technology they have become incredibly widely utilised. In the mid-1990s Photoshop was only for specialists. Now it, and a whole host of technologies are so prevalent they’re effectively invisible. The troubling question is whether we have come to terms with them at all yet, by which I mean, fully grasped the fact they’ve changed our relationship to the truth of photography, and to everything around us.

DH:

What’s interesting to me is how far we are invested in vision, in every aspect of these technologies. In the entertainment worlds of gaming and cinema, and in military-industrial research that results in Google maps and Google Earth, making visible is what is at stake. Obviously, the perceptual reach of these technologies is now very deep, and probably even deeper than we know. They have given us a new orientation towards the world. They allow a new kind of spatial thinking, put simply. To take one example, the position of our own bodies in relation to that material, the digital realm, is very new. No-one was ever able to continuously track the motion of objects in space, or monitor our own position in relation to the rest of the world. That is unprecedented. The gap, I think, is between the experience and the ways most people can think about it. The language that underpins these technologies is absent to most people; it’s outside of everyday discourse.

One of the things we can do as photographic artists is to provide a means to think through what these developments mean, through images themselves rather than language. The question is how to do that. I hold firm the recognition that the screen – more accurately the surface of the screen as an interface – must be acknowledged, and ‘expressed’ inside the work, as architects say about the structures of their buildings. It has to be made present and made subject to examination. The interface itself is a physical reality with its own material value. My recent works are ‘concrete’ in the sense that modernist art was. They are not about ‘transporting’ the viewer elsewhere, but about rethinking what our body is, in relation to this strange new type of object. The type of interface on offer is very different to that of a smart-phone for example.

MK:

To me the screen does still feel like a new ‘frontier’ for artists. Of all the implications of new technology, it is one of the most discussed (and vilified) in everyday discourse. Younger generations are branded as screen-obsessed, and therefore less able to participate in felt experience. The screen is the cliff edge, and journalists describe the entire population as teetering on the precipice of infinite content beyond. One impact of this sublime over-stimulation is the deluge of images of every conceivable place, phenomena and object, such that nothing is new; nothing can be seen for the first time in the moment.

DH:

I’m not sure that the division between mediated and unmediated is so sharp. The élite who took the eighteenth-century European Grand Tour had a shared understanding that theirs would be an aestheticised experience. Tourists read about their destinations in advance so that the ‘direct’ experience of place was then always mediated by representations, whether poetry or painting. Even more strikingly, grand tourists took a ‘Claude Glass’ – a blackened, concave, lacquered piece of mirror glass that made landscapes look like Claude Lorrain paintings. They literally carried a lens around with them that remade the world so it looked like art. The Glass made the landscape appear in reverse, of course, as lenses do. So it didn’t just aestheticise; it distanced people from the space they stood in. We might say we all have framing devices for looking at landscape: some literal, some metaphorical. The tourists self-consciously remodelled the world, and stepped into the ‘second space’ of perception they could access with the magic of the Claude Glass. I suspect that camera phones play the same role now for tourists.

MK:

Your work seems as far away as possible from this, removed from the expectations of a photograph as an image that we might expect. Far from a view onto the world, the space they replicate is resistant to entry, as if it is itself a solid rather than occupying a void. This fundamentally shifts the relationships of the viewer to the work, who no longer looks through the photographic surface but is held at its surface. They seem to not merely be addressing our sense of sight, but appealing to our tactile senses or to our spatial feeling.

DH:

The Spatial Objects are still images, being photographic prints, but as objects they reconfigure the space around them. The ‘thrust’ is different: I see them as functioning in the way minimalist artworks do, like Donald Judd’s boxes or Dan Flavin’s fluorescent lights, or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Room Modulator. They re-organise the space around them. They are also like room-scale op-art objects: their optical effects shift the viewer’s sense of space, and of scale. The structure of each image in Spatial Objects has what I call a soft optic. It provides a very particular kind of space, which makes clear the ‘perceptual architecture’ of the digital realm. We encounter the very means by which digital perception is built, and the virtual space it is built in. The viewer’s visual field is made manifest in a different way. The viewer’s own body does become the centre or the focus of the image. Their body is the ‘absent centre’, and the different sense of space and scale of the works focus viewers’ attention back on themselves.

MK:

Your work couldn’t be described as occupying an adversarial position towards the viewer, though. The tone of address is measured, contrary to many cultural preconceptions of technology as a threat to the viewer; to the human body. If the screen is feared (yet accepted as a necessary evil) the true dream of some and nightmare of others is technology fully integrated into the body, a state we are making steps towards with wearable technology. The transfer goes in the opposite direction with your work, as though human vision is performed on our behalf by an external object. Are biology and machine-life symbiotic in your work, such that the objects might be described as cyborg-like in the way Donna Haraway uses the term, as new forms of life? Or do you see your objects as being sublimely indifferent to us? Or as ‘incommensurate’ with us, in the way that Graham Harman sees forms of material as being ultimately inaccessible to humans? Harman describes our attempts to empathise with objects as intrinsically flawed or foolhardy, or rather he pictures our attempt to think about the material world as an impossible project. For him, understanding ‘matter’ is as impossible and as a theologian’s doomed attempt to understand the mind of God. Matter itself is impenetrable for him, even if man-made technologies can extend our capacities whether by acting as bodily prostheses, or as data-gathering instruments independent of us.  

DH

Those debates - about what we should imagine the world as being constituted of and how we can know it; and what capacities we should imagine technology as affording - are open questions for me. Or rather they are precisely the questions which I want the work to address and allow us to think about. I think that fear of being subsumed into the camera and its life is part of the very mythology of the camera, and is over a century old. It’s not specific to digital media. The idea of a human-camera cyborg figure goes back to Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, and his attempt to integrate the camera into the body. The ideal was a cybernetic relationship between the industrial object, the camera, and human perception. Vertov places the camera in the position of a train, or aeroplane, so that he could symbolically integrate himself with the machine. Or rather, instigate a future in which a new kind of integration becomes a reality. His work projects forward to envisage a time when the eye and the camera become as one.

This idea of ‘the cybernetic’ might actually be thought of as a thoroughly ‘analogue’ trope, in other words. The appropriation of a mechanical optic, the camera, to integrate it with that of our eye, runs through twentieth-century film and early modernist photography. My thought, rather, is that we need to restate that artist-photographers are best-placed to think about these technologies and develop new languages within them and for them. Perhaps only we can generate entirely new forms of image and object ‘from within’, rather than describing them with verbal language from ‘outside’.

MK:

Some thinkers suggest that our understanding of photography is still based in the problems that the analogue tradition brought to life, and that there is a gap between the retrogressive ontology of the photographic image, and technologies that have run away from our grasp. The implication is that the fundamental change in technology has had little impact on the ontology of photography, nor even on the scope of practice today – of what photography is or could be. If your recent question what could become imaginable if we were not only to ‘think the digital’, but think digitally?

DH:

Actually, my view is that photography has always alluded to a virtual space, that it’s a fundamental part of its history that has come into focus. Victorian portrait photography could be described as about creating a virtual brother or mother to travel with you – about creating an avatar of your loved one so that their ‘second life’ character, in the photograph, could always be present with you, wherever you were in the world.

MK:

That is a very interesting position, especially given that it has proven near impossible – to this day – to shake the association with reality that photography has been burdened with from the start. But you’re right; this burden has always co-existed with a kind of magic or even mysticism. The art historian E H Gombrich once wrote that something like ‘deep down, we all of us believe in image-magic’, and arguably today only photography retains that primordial power that images can have over us. Interestingly, your works address that issue by perversely being less like traditional ‘images’ and more like ‘art objects’ whose auratic power comes from within, rather than from their skin or surface.

The sudden apparition of a face or scene out of a chemical bath is like alchemy (or the origin myth of life emerging from the primordial soup played out at warp speed). Now the apparent ally of most photography might be thought to be computer graphics, but I would think you look to sculpture and conceptual art as reference points. Even despite the conceptual artists’ reliance upon photography to document or present their work, and sculptors’ understanding of each others’ work through images, my feeling is that these make for strange bedfellows.

DH: 

Let me put it this way. I don’t want to make yet more images that merely show aspects of a pre-existing world which a viewer already knows. I want to bring a new world into being, using new means of becoming. Or of un-becoming. Continuous Topography shows discrete worlds that are clearly in a state of becoming – of coalescing, as if gases forming and gathering which will then become planets, seen at the beginning of the universe.  Or, alternatively, they are landscapes in a state of un-becoming, of disintegration or degradation, . What they aren’t, or can’t be seen as, are places in a state of stasis. In the Anthropocene, stasis patently doesn’t exist, even if it ever did. In this sense my work is indebted to Robert Smithson’s ideas of entropy as much as the Deleuzian idea that every living thing is continuously coming-into-being, and that the planet is a living thing as a totality.

These are some of the reasons why we need to develop a new language of visibility. Timothy Morton talks about ‘hyperobjects’ that include global warming: things that exist but aren’t directly visible other than through their effects or consequences. Global warming itself can’t ever be seen, but most people accept it exists – somewhere. How can we imagine something that can’t be seen or shown, but which will have an effect upon every living thing? How can we imagine something whose very enormity goes beyond what is thinkable, that outstrips what we can even conceive of or can present to our minds through any human scale?

Perhaps the only means we have to do that is through the digital, ironic as it is. If we can begin to fully understand how the digital is a ‘material’ in and of itself we might be able to make sense of the scales we need to think on, micro- and macro-. We might be able to make use of machines’ powers of calculation to show what we can’t visualize or bring to mind. I don’t think anyone truly knows how to handle it – the digital realm – as a distinct form of material. That’s why making the digital as a ‘material’ visible, in the development of a visual language, is so important to me. And finding the limits of our materials as well as their affordances and characteristics is crucial to that enquiry. Using new technological possibilities to express the thickly material nature of the digital is what I have become preoccupied with, in part. It has to be seen as a material in the very strictest or most literal sense.

I imagine that as the reason the eye is pulled towards screens, and the physicality of the reactions that digital images provoke. My work makes manifest our physical relationship with screen technologies. It’s as though there is a feeling in the eye itself in engaging with the work. I’m interested in provoking a spatial three-dimensional experience that necessitates a dynamic response and in turn, a philosophical one. My photographs avoid becoming only information, or events, or even just ‘things’. The works articulate a form of physical perception, rather than being forms of depiction.

MK:

That view sounds akin to the departure made in modern art when Maurice Denis insisted we recognise that a painting is ‘a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’. On this view, we return to the conviction that the photograph is real, but not just in a documentary sense of being an indexical sign, but in a material sense of being a thing-in-the-world. I was once taught that there were tribespeople who anthropologists studied who couldn’t ‘read’ a photograph as a surface, only as a three-dimensional thing. They couldn’t ‘see in’, in Richard Wollheim’s sense, only ‘see as’. They had never learned that photographs offered illusions: they saw photographs as being patterns of colour, exactly as Denis advocated. What your work seems to suggest is that we need to unlearn that illusion, or at least recollect that photographs are not only charming illusions but are as Walter Benjamin suggests, are talismanic. Benjamin’s writing suggests that we need to build a theology of the photograph, as much as construct an ontology of it.  

DH:

I’ve never put it like that, though obviously every artist has to believe that their works have a power of their own which are particular to them and to their medium. Certainly I want people to encounter types of objects they haven’t before, and to have to approach them without foreknowledge of how they can or should be known, and how they can be ‘read’. And works like Spatial Objects do and should resist being ‘read’, as texts. They offer a physical, bodily experience of virtual space: a deliberate contradiction.

The new visual language that I’m developing invites people to think about that issue by placing a greater responsibility on them as viewers. It asks them to reflect on their own, particular form of perceptual activity; on the movement of their optic nerve and what that means. That encounter with the virtual is, paradoxically, more ‘real’ than yet another documentary image; it delivers a shock to the system.

MK:

You have long expressed the idea that whatever we think of as reality has to be understood in relation to our perception as it is constructed and made possible by technologies. To acknowledge that images shape our reality and our perception is to imply that your work does so too. How exactly do you see them functioning in this way?

DH:

In Spatial Objects, each work has a space in itself: the dual space of the print, and that of the screen represented. In my recent work I’ve been interested in the very defects of the digital precisely because those defects have provided a starting point to think about how virtual space can be thought about as a place of making, which it is seldom seen as. It is also a space to think from. Why is that important? Well, images are now everywhere to the point they are invisible: they require no thought to process them. Artists are amongst the few people able to reconfigure what photographs can be or do. My works have the obligation to offer a new space to think from.

So in my work, the eye is allowed to inhabit the space of the image. That is difficult to describe, but is borne out by the experience of the works. That space is itself the very architecture with which the image is built. I see the work in itself as an ‘optic‘, by which I mean a way of looking rather than an object to look at. By addressing a way of looking, we can start to think about what our interface to the virtual world is or consists of. The work is, in effect, representative of digital interfaces, the very things that allow us to see virtual space at all.

I see Spatial Objects as doubly material, rather than immaterial. My materials are both virtual and physical, and the works function in both realms, as it were, using the materials of both. In the media, so often imagery is mediated and ‘ghosted’, that is, altered without trace. The ‘ghosting’ in images for me represents how media imagery is changing. The traces of the author’s hand are associated with painting rather than photography, and are entirely absent in digital imaging. Traces left behind mean an image has a history, and makes visible what is kept seamless elsewhere in the world of images: changes that get called pentimenti in art history. The suggestion of presence reminds the viewer about their own physical presence, and the physicality of the virtual.

MK:

It is easy to see how this is the polar opposite of digital images, where no trace of process need survive: the artist’s hand is obliterated, usually. But this implies erasure of the effort taken to make something, and the evidence how to do it again. The digital destroys its past as it evolves. As technology marches on, obsolescence is incessant. This has huge implications for where we are heading, collectively as a species.

DH:

That’s why Vilém Flusser in Towards the Philosophy of Photography takes photography as a metaphor for technology as a whole. Photography provides a mechanism for describing the evolution of technology in its entirety, and our co-evolution with it. Delimiting photography is impossible: it’s impossible to define comprehensively. The word photo-graphy famously means ‘light-writing’, so that attempting to define it as one thing is like attempting to define all ‘writing’. Like language, it can never be static. If technology is evolving so must our language alongside it. So let’s call it a kind of live language that I’m trying to develop. Flusser’s fundamental point is that photography can only exist in a state of permanent change. My belief is that the process of change is so little understood that technology is escaping us, eluding our understanding.

MK:

There a sense in which the patent block on immediate comprehension your work offers prevents viewers from finding any ready point of closure. Our ordinarily encounters with images, outside of the gallery, is to cursorily ascribe meaning to things and move on: to things we think we understand but haven’t ever contemplated to put to the test. Your works seem so far beyond any ready reckoning or easy grasp, that at least we know that we need to strive for an understanding, and arguably get to grips with a new language in order to attain it. For instance, it feels deeply inappropriate to call your recent works ‘representational’. Whereas many great works of photography are also not representational, some slip just easily enough into that category so as to not need any further interrogation. Your work, on the other hand, demands a new mode of being addressed, of brought into mind. It refuses being readily assimilated: if you like, it doesn’t compute.

DH:

I do believe that: it’s why I don’t use the term ‘representation’ about my work. I prefer to say that it is an ‘extraction’ of the virtual from the digital world. We are looking back on the real, from the world of the virtual, as it were. But the virtual still has to be placed into ‘real’ space to be legible or to be subject to thought. That happens in the sacred space of the gallery. To become an object of critical perception, and for us to develop a language around it, the digital has to be seen outside of what we might call its natural home of the screen. We are re-materializing data into objects, to show their original objecthood.

MK:

Does this extraction bear any semblance to abstraction? The democratizing of visual data into pigment on canvas as Maurice Denis asserted could be seen as akin to the indifference of pixels, capturing the real or the invented with equal clarity. There is a superficial equivalence between your work and the formal exercises of abstract photography – what would you say to that?

DH:

The trend of ‘abstract photography’ is simply not engaging with the present: it’s ‘retro-modernism’. Most such works are purely about aesthetics rather than about the virtual as a realm, or what we might call the heritage-to-come of a wholly new material. I think we should differentiate between abstraction, and extraction: in an extractive process, the pictorial language is that of the material itself. The objects have a ‘nature’ of their own that isn’t just about their colour or light alone. That comes out of the very technologies and materials of which they are made.

MK:

Precisely. Abstraction is a process that starts from the real visible world and makes steps to move away from it. What you do is much more incisive, going deeper into the matter, like the camera in Charles and Ray Eames’ ‘Powers of Ten’. The resultant images look abstract, or even void, but they actually render reality at an atomic (or cosmic) level of detail.

DH:

Paul Virilio’s idea of the aesthetics of disappearance makes sense in relation to that. To me, the ‘reality’ of the screen is where the ‘equal reality’ of the virtual is built. The engineering and the substructure of the virtual realm exist on an equally material plane to the ‘physical’ one. The problem in my recent work is to make both become tangible at the same time, and give them equal weight and presence.

MK:

Do you view these works, which deal with the very basis of perception, as a departure from your earlier works which seems to address the physical landscape? They look critically at how it is tracked, measured and controlled. Would you say that these earlier works had a more tangibly political dimension?

DH:

Well, perception is political in itself, just as Rancière says. It’s impossible to see all of the world; we only ever notice a tiny proportion of the objects in it, and only ever register a minuscule proportion of the spectrum of rays that are perceptible by other species. More historically, our perception of the world is necessarily mediated by the digital. Our ability to navigate it is, ultimately, a political issue.

MK:

There’s a lot of room for nuance in that view of ‘the political’. I suppose one trait that seems to separate what we conventionally see as the political world and the digital world, may be that in the latter, nothing seems irrevocable, or irredeemable. The realm of choices we’re offered seems infinite, but nothing would seem to rule over ideas out in the way that political choices necessarily preclude other ideas being given prominence. Put another way: what is the role of uncertainty in your approach?

DH:

Reversibility and malleability have been crucial to my development. It wasn’t until I made Blackout that I had integrated analogue and digital together not only technically but conceptually. The whole concept of the work, the idea of this expression of the material nature of the photograph could only be done using digital processes. In Blackout, the base of the color is film, but the colours are then the topography of the negative as scanned by a drum scanner. The final work can only be made through a digital inversion: a digital negative of analogue material.

Blackout becomes about a negative space, and becomes a carrier for the analogue, as the analogue negative is the means by which we first see that form. The work also made me aware of the infinite possibilities that the digital realm offers – and how those could be made tangible.

MK:

This sense of infinite possibility is inherent to digital artwork. But notoriously, too much choice can have a paralyzing effect. It is clear that you navigate this realm of possibilities with a very specific guiding principle – how would define what that is?

DH

Since the 1990s we have all seen how people have claimed the digital has a particular significance for photography, and conditioned it. It’s the conditions of possibility that are at stake in my work. We might say that if the reality of images has changed, because people know the world through images, then the meaning of reality must have changed with it. Our challenge is to conceptualise those things and make them vividly present in the most powerful way.

MK:

For you, landscape has always been a key tool to that end. It is relatable, subject to control, and all-encompassing. In Continuous Topography, you have progressed from photographing known landscapes, to re-constructing landscapes in intimate detail. The results are presented in two-dimensions – in print and on screen rather than as 3D prints for example – but read as both profoundly sculptural, as though you have carved that plot of land, and right at the threshold at which we can ‘grasp’ them, as tactile presences with clear planes and parameters.

DH:

Landscape always offers us the potential to project onto it. I see landscape as a kind of ‘material’ as well, to be worked upon. Landscape is able to be modelled to articulate new ideas about our understanding of the world, or of the non-human world. It invites us to think about those divisions: where our domain ends, and what we can control and cannot.

MK:

I would suggest discourses around ‘landscape’ and ‘photography’ allocate them equivalent status, as objects of knowledge. People do still instinctively trust their veracity or authenticity. Landscapes are still seen as somehow ‘real’, as being unmediated and outside of human control. Your work has always challenged this naïve equation between ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’. But it has also used that assumption to your advantage, to imbue your work with a sense of integrity to lived experience.

DH:

Landscape allows us to think about inner and outer space: which is precisely why it lends itself to thinking about the virtual, to digital space. The idea of landscape is that it is a space that extends infinitely in front of you - yet which also extends or mirrors our own internal space, that of the human mind. We so often seem to have this sense of the landscape representing human thought. Moreover, there’s a special sense of time specific to being ‘inside’ a landscape, and which allows other lines of thought to be opened up. Paradoxically, we can think about how time has accelerated or collapsed under late capitalism and its technologies because the space of landscape is kept imaginatively ‘separate’ even if it’s dominated by human affairs. For example, one of the very first photographers I became interested in was Richard Misrach. In his Desert Cantos series he looks at atomic test sites in the deserts in Nevada. You see the devastating effects upon, for example, the livestock. You see these strange apocalyptic scenes of what initially appear to be volcanic craters, but which must be atomic craters. They are full of dead animals. But it’s impossible not to see it in terms of landscape, despite the evidence of mass destruction.

I see the threat of the Cold War of my childhood as having been transmogrified into the existential threat of climate change that will lead to our extinction as a species. If that has had some traction since the 1970s, then the recent change is that more people have become self-conscious about their own actions and their consequences for the entire ecosystem we live within. My earlier work could hardly be about anything other than nature as a set of systems. If we used to talk about the landscape being politicized in quite a simple sense, today I’m more aware that it is our own perception that has become the space of political contestation. My work is therefore about articulating perception: about making perception itself very tangible. That makes perception something that people have to be responsible for. So one motivation is to hold oneself responsibility for our own ways of looking, that is of looking at everything that extends beyond ourselves. So my work today implies that the viewer must become responsible for their own perception of the work. Which is where ideas about the crisis of the image carry a sense of urgency. Because a crisis in our ability to perceive is also a crisis in our ability to act.

MK:

So often landscape photography is tasked with being beautiful; or else associated with a very simple idea of the sublime that argues for the ‘protection’ of something that was already man-made. But there is an unwillingness to see the kind of threat that you mention. Outside of academic, ‘the landscape’ is characteristically seen as a sanctuary: a place well away from the cataclysmic menace of human foolishness. Does this reluctance colour the reception of your work? 

DH:

I have a sense that there seems to be difficulty around the idea of ‘responsibility for seeing’. Partially, it is the desire to only ever interpret photographic imagery through the idealisation of certain types of spaces. Photography, of course, is a combatant and not a consolation.

MK:

How does this impetus relate to what is perhaps your longest preoccupation – the nature of (different types of) light? Of course in a simple but inescapable way, all photography is made of light. But in your work light – specifically artificial light – is also the subject.

DH:

I don’t think those strands in my thinking can be disentangled. Rightly I think, Timothy Morton argues there is no longer any outside. Everything is connected – now literally by cables and satellites. Our perception has been subject to an almighty extension, in that sense. I see my early work Megalith now as having been a prelude to my later thinking. That work operates in part at the level of representation. When I made it, I was fascinated by the language of these simple, ubiquitous, utilitarian structures in non-places like motorways. It shows the back of a motorway advertising hoarding, so that you never see the photographic image on the other side. So the object’s role as advertising is a purely functional one that is also an ideological one: it is to ‘transmit’ an idea to a mass public. My job was to obliterate it with light so that that ideology became whited out, as it were. The critical ideas there are made in pictorial means, rather than overtly. My own reading isn’t that the light comes necessarily from the object, but that it seems to be emitted from the earth’s surface upwards and outwards into outer space, in a reversal of daylight. It represented a kind of new kind of transmission of virtual light. On the one hand, that kind of light was only seen on film, due to long exposure; and it was only materialized in the new, CAD digitally-drawn world which presages the virtual world to come.

The subject of the photograph lies between the structure, or the environment as an architectural, man-made space which contains it, and the light itself. The structure is a totemic object; it presupposes a rather primal kind of archaic worship of icons, of modern gods. The light is, of course, almost that of a religious revelation. So the work is a coming together of the archaic and the technological through these two symbols. And the light creates a particular space-time: it is at night, where the light is then transmitting into the cosmos: it’s transmitting into a wilderness of infinite space. The billboard is like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey it connects us to everything else.

MK:

There something sinister to this inversion when it is seen in city-scapes; the natural light of the cosmos being outshone by the unnatural glare of man-made idols. But the same sense of light emanating out is also evident in works like Blackout, the mountain landscape of which detaches it from immediate associations with human intervention.

DH:

Electronic light, let’s call it, is one long-term preoccupation. It’s almost been a continuous motif in my work. I almost never shoot in daylight. Blackout was shot in daylight but the works feel to have their own artificial light. Their light becomes akin to the digital light of the screen.

In Blackout you might say the light we see is that of the scanner on the film illuminating and recording, mapping the topography of the film. In the work Transmission: New Remote Earth Views, the light we see is that of the laser that scanned the space as well as that of the screen. The image can only be created by passing a laser across the entire landscape, and a laser is light itself. The laser is like an extension of human capacities in the way Bruno Latour describes. I see the laser as a tool crawling and feeling its way across the surface of the landscape: it’s a visceral kind of recording of landscape. Robert Smithson talks about the ancient Greeks having this idea that the eye operated like a scanner. They believed the eye effectively projected a beam onto the surface it perceived: our eyes worked like a laser acting upon external material. I like thinking about my work in those terms. You internalize an object by knowing it, or devouring it, as an environmentalist might say of a landscape that has been taken over by us.

MK:

So light is a means to define, extract, and sculpt into being a self-contained physical manifestation of the landscape. And to do so in a way that literally ‘objectifies’ and delimits an otherwise unknowable expanse. The aesthetic of the work is exquisite, but more importantly, what does this objectification seek to achieve?  

DH:

I think of it in relation to the imaginary volume that a landscape presents to us. The idea of articulating it through my working process is key. I want my pictures to speak through volume. Form is central to identifying structures, and what underlies what we see. In certain works I suggest structures through the process of making the picture, rather than representing them. What I want is for the work to be able to talk about multiple things at once – about the place and my encounter with it; about the history of photography, and its future; about what kind of thing a photograph is – and about what it is that a single static image can do in the world when there are many trillions of others that compete for our attention.