Koos van der Lende’s intensely personal engagements with the environment underpin his status as a leading South African landscape photographer. Born in Pretoria, South Africa (1955), he emigrated to the Netherlands with his Dutch parents in 1971. After completing his studies at the School of Photography in The Hague, |
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he visited the country of his birth in 1977. The experience prompted him to return on a more permanent basis, and in 1983 he immigrated back to South Africa. He spent the next two decades working as a commercial photographer, in 2002 decisively abandoning the confines of a studio environment for the outdoors, where he spends most of his year photographing series of limited edition work. Van der Lende’s portfolio is testimony of his formidable artistic talent and unrelenting dedication to the art of photography. Working from Pretoria, he mostly shoots in panoramic format using the time-honoured film and darkroom processing techniques. The large vistas his camera records are technically complex, Van der Lende spending days, sometimes even weeks researching the ambience of each potential composition. Typically, his pictures blend natural and artificial lighting sources, with minimal intervention afterwards during the printing and reproduction of his spectacular prints. The photographer imbues the picturesque quality of his landscapes with an added layer of spiritual intensity, although Van der Lende is by no means proscriptive in enforcing this view. Modesty is central to both his character and his work, which in itself records an awestruck moment of humility and wonder. |
