Koos van der Lende

How a picture is made

He does not make many pictures of one place, he makes one. He walks the land with three small viewers matching his three lenses, marks a spot, walks away, then comes back hours later without looking, to see whether he arrives at the same place. A compass tells him where the sun will rise. Often the camera is set the evening before, wrapped in plastic for the night, and he sleeps beside it. When the light comes he works fast, carrying up to twelve reflector boards to throw the low sun into a tree, running from board to board as the angle changes. After sunset he paints trunks and rocks with a hand lamp through exposures of many minutes, walking into the frame dressed in black, invisible to the film. He leaves no fire and no footprints. Two pictures on a lucky day, and sometimes twelve days for one.

“I don’t want a record of a landscape. It has to be art. The slide, the transparency, is my canvas.” — Koos van der Lende

The collections

Baobab, Classic, Sacred Forests, Solitary Survivor, Evidence of Mankind, Water Pear Tree, and the Latest Release, eight panoramas from the archive offered for the first time, half of them from two months alone in the Niassa in northern Mozambique. His book, Moments of Grace, gathers the work in print.

Recognition

His close study of a welwitschia in the Namib Naukluft was commended at the BBC Wildlife awards in London, where a judge said she had never seen the plant so well photographed. He was commissioned to photograph every national park in South Africa in panoramic format for a series of postage stamps, and he worked for years alongside the Peace Parks Foundation, photographing the transfrontier parks, which gave him access to country few people are allowed to enter.

The prints, and the originals

Each work is an archival pigment print from the original slide, signed and numbered, with a certificate of authenticity, in editions of twenty five across all sizes together. Nothing is altered, so the print carries what the film carried. The original transparencies, one of one, are offered privately to collectors through the gallery. His own site, delende.com, carries the full story, the films and his field notes.