Dan Holdsworth is wound up. “If Turner was alive today, he wouldn’t be painting. He’d be making films on a massive scale. What has painting got to do with how we live today? As a medium, it’s totally irrelevant.”

Not much gets a rise out of the otherwise serene 31-year-old British landscape photographer. He almost levitates with calm. But the idea that photography is the lazy option for art school kids is like questioning Simon Cowell’s masculinity. How many of us pay the mortgage by spending months on end working completely alone, through the night, in some of the most dangerous places on Earth, with a minus 40 degrees wind chill? As Holdsworth says: “My kind of photography isn’t easy.” He’s got the frostbite marks to prove it.

Holdsworth has smouldered on the edge of the British photography scene since being shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures competition aged only 25. He was the youngest British photographer to be acquired by the Tate and his work is now in the V&A collection as well as adorning the walls of some very fashionable homes — Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen. Even Cherie and Tony Blair have a couple of his prints covering the cracks at No 10.

When you look at his work, it’s never clear what you’re seeing. What could be a post-nuclear vista of LA is in fact Bluewater Shopping Centre. A surreal spaceship in flight against an eerie red sky happens to be the backside of an advertising billboard in the Netherlands.

The biggest surprise is that none of it is digital trickery. Holdsworth plays with long exposure times and artificial lighting. Most of the images look as though they are shot in tropical sunlight, but they are nearly all captured in the dead of the night with exposures sometimes lasting four hours. The work begs the viewer to move into the picture. You begin to make out the edge of cars, buildings, a chimney, the trails of stars . . . is that a passing satellite? Holdsworth’s work involves days of preparation, finding the right locations in daylight in unforgiving terrain and then returning and waiting for the image to reveal itself. His photographs extend time rather than capture the instant and are certainly less gritty than those of ultra-fashionable photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans.

His latest solo show at the National Maritime Museum, At the Edge of Space, disorientates the visitor. What looks like the tightrope bridge into Ant and Dec’s I’m a Celebrity . . . camp is actually the Gregorian — the world’s largest space radio telescope, in Puerto Rico. It’s listening for the Big Bang. And if you believe Jodie Foster’s character in Contact (the movie was shot here) it’s listening for aliens, too.

The film references don’t stop there. A series of images shot at the European Space Centre in French Guiana could be stills from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars or even Thunderbirds. But these aren’t just for space geeks. The work never features people but emanates humanity and warmth. The final room of the Maritime show reveals new work, Hyperborea, shot against the Northern Lights in Norway this year.

Why the otherworldliness of the images? “So many landscape images look the same. I’m trying to create something new for the viewer that makes them rethink their environment.”

Growing up in Middlesbrough with an art teacher mother and a father who was a scientist, Holdsworth’s interests fell between the two. He started taking pictures aged 16, around the time he left school.

Holdsworth Sr, a scientific researcher, was away working all over the world through Dan’s childhood. “He was a mad-keen photographer and would come home from these glamorous places like Japan or Africa and give us amazing slide shows of his travels and work.” Science and photography left an imprint. “I would go to the Yorkshire moors and into Teesside with my dad and walk for hours taking pictures of the industrial landscape.”

Dropping out of an art degree course in Blackpool — “It was just too commercial for me” — Holdsworth moved to London, where he found work as a photographer’s assistant on trendy magazines such as iD and Interview. “Living in London is what drew me to working at night. It was a practical thing. I was working during the day so the night was the only time I had to photograph.” It was against this nocturnal urban backdrop that he started to take images of motorway flyovers, pylons and empty car parks, striving to “memorialise” decaying urban landscapes. Within a year he had enrolled at the London College of Printing.

Two weeks after he was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures prize in 2001, Holdsworth’s father died of cancer. “He was really proud, but he never got to see the exhibition. We were really good friends and after he died I found it hard to work for a long time. Spending that much time making photographs outside on my own was too hard.” His father’s work had involved researching plastic materials, including working on the coating for the Space Shuttle. Is it a coincidence that Holdsworth’s own work now finds him almost fetishising space travel and science? “It’s funny that I have ended up documenting the world of science so much. I sometimes feel like I am entering my dad’s world through the back door.”

Next, Holdsworth — who lives in Hammersmith, West London, with his wife Justine — plans to go to China. “The changing urban landscape there fascinates me. The rate of industrialisation there is really rapid.”

As British photographers such as Sam Taylor-Wood and Rankin become household names — often allowing their work to be eclipsed by their own celebrity — where does he see his place? “I’m really shy. I hate having my photo taken,” he says. “I always feel ludicrous. I like to let my photographs speak for me.” And they do, in all their haunting beauty.

• Dan Holdsworth: At the Edge of Space, Parts 1–3, the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London SE10, until Jan 7 (0870 780 4552; www.nmm.ac.uk), free