Profile Brooke Holm

The 2nd Prize Winner of our 2018 Color Award, Australian-American artist Brooke Holm is undoubtedly one of today’s most promising and insightful emerging landscape photographers.

Holm’s artistic journey was shaped by her deep connection with nature and landscapes, which ultimately ignited her passion for photography. She spent a significant portion of her early life outdoors, and, following her parents’ divorce, her frequent trips to California from her native Australia exposed her to landscapes entirely different from those she knew and loved.

“Flying over my two homelands, I would look out the window to see what lay beneath. I loved the textures and shapes, and the feeling of smallness, and connection, of being part of a greater whole. My circumstances had me poised to experience our world from this angle and height. I was always obsessed with that view.”

This new perspective on the world had a profound impact on her. When she eventually embarked on her photographic journey in earnest, it was from a helicopter soaring over the rugged landscapes of New Zealand. At that moment she realized her calling to primarily focus on aerial landscape imagery, a commitment that continues to define her artistic practice today.

At first glance, Holm’s images appear to be abstract paintings. Her mastery of composition and keen eye for color, light, and texture, combined with the 90-degree angle, transform earthly landscapes into truly captivating masterpieces. Yet, these images are more than just fine art. They are documentations that seek to challenge traditional anthropocentric narratives and promote coexistence with our environment and its inhabitants.

In addition to drawing inspiration from the natural world, Holm credits a diverse range of artists as having impacted her practice. Artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Ana Mendieta, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Agnes Denes, Richard Mosse, and Gerhard Richter all of whom “have explored their own versions of what it means to coexist with nature, delving into life’s greater mysteries, such as what is seen and unseen.”

Holm’s projects are conceptual and visual explorations resulting from extensive research into locations that ignite her curiosity. She meticulously studies satellite imagery to explore aspects such as color, texture, context, human intervention, and human absence, and uses Google Earth, NASA’s archives, Landsat, and the HiRISE Mars catalog. The latter was incorporated into her most recent project, ‘Valle Mortis’, where she juxtaposed her aerial depictions of California’s rugged ‘Death Valley’ with Mars satellite imagery, creating a series of lenticular prints.

“It was a story about geology and terrain, the similarities between terrestrial planets, and the physical evidence of climate change – a sublime omen from a planet that has been there and done that.”

For these projects, Holm primarily uses a super high-resolution medium format digital camera and a custom gyroscope, and also collaborates closely with helicopter pilots to ensure she reaches the right locations or achieves the perfect angle or degree of turn to capture the desired shot.

Despite the surreal nature of her images, her editing process remains minimal, focusing primarily on color correction, contrast adjustments, and working with curves, while the tactility of the textures she captures is naturally emphasized by the larger sensor on her medium format camera.

Holm’s works are truly extraordinary, serving as a poignant testament to the profound beauty of the world we inhabit. They eloquently demonstrate the potential of landscape photography to not only capture the extraordinary splendor of the natural world but also to provoke important questions about our relationship with the planet.

All images © Brooke Holm