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 immigrated to the Netherlands with his Dutch parents in 1971. After completing his studies at the School of Photography in The Hague , he revisited 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 out of Pretoria , he mostly shoots panoramic format using time-honoured film and traditional darkroom processing techniques. The large vistas he captures are technically complex, with van der Lende spending days, sometimes even weeks researching the ambience of each potential composition. Besides his panoramic format he also shoots with a 35mm film camera to compliment his large format photography, here he adopts a different approach to his legendary imaging and this collection is brought to the market as open editions, printed on archival papers and other mediums. Typically, his pictures blend natural and artificial lighting sources, with minimal intervention 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.