Koos van der Lende

Koos van der Lende was born in Pretoria in 1955. When he was sixteen his Dutch parents took the family back to the Netherlands, and there he trained at the School of Photography in The Hague.

At twenty one he came back to Africa on his own and travelled for ten months. It was on that journey that he decided to become a photographer. In 1983 he returned to South Africa for good, starting as an assistant in a commercial studio in Pretoria, and for the next twenty years he worked as a commercial photographer. Every holiday went to the Kalahari and to Namibia.

Then he flew to New York and bought a Fuji 6 × 17 cm panoramic camera, entirely manual, with no prism. The picture appears upside down on the ground glass, under a black cloth, as it has for a hundred years.

In 2002 Koos made a decision that changed everything: he would no longer work for money. After twenty years of commercial deadlines, where everything had to be done quickly to save money, his panoramic work would be given to God, and it would be the very best he could make.

For the next eighteen years he worked full time in the wild places of Southern Africa: Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. He travelled alone for eight to ten weeks at a time, with food for two months, water for three or four weeks and some three hundred rolls of film, each roll holding only four pictures. There was no phone and no satellite link. If he was not back after eleven weeks, they were to come and look for him.

I was used to being alone, but never lonely. For me that was the special connection, with the landscape, and with God in the landscape.— Koos van der Lende

Koos speaks of composition the way he speaks of faith. There are laws, the rules every photographer learns and must respect. But a panoramic frame is only six centimetres high, and some of those rules no longer fit. Knowing when to keep them and when to set them aside, he calls grace.

Under the black cloth the picture is small and upside down. He cannot see the detail, only the balance of the whole, and that is when he knows.

You can feel it immediately, and that, I think, is the grace: you can feel peace.— Koos van der Lende

Grace, he says, is also something to give yourself. A perfectionist all his life, he has learned not only to live by the law, but to have more grace for himself.

Koos does not make many pictures of one place. He makes one. He walks the land with three small viewers that match his three lenses, marks a spot, walks away, and comes back hours later without looking, to see whether he arrives at the same place. A compass tells him where the sun will rise and set. Often he sets the camera up the day before, wrapped in plastic for the night, and sleeps beside it.

When the light comes he works fast: up to twelve reflector boards to carry the low sun into a tree or a plant, running from board to board as the angle changes. After sunset he paints trunks and rocks with a hand lamp during exposures of many minutes, sometimes walking through the picture dressed in black, invisible to the film. He leaves no fire and no footprints. And he waits, two pictures on a lucky day, 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

That is why nothing is altered afterwards. Every print in the De Lende Collection comes from the original slide, exactly as the film saw it.

Weeks alone in wild country bring their own stories. Koos has faced a lioness at close quarters and held his ground, remembering the Bible's word that when you have done everything, you stand. He has raised his hands to an elephant and turned it back in the name of the Lord.

Once, in the dry bed of the Ugab River in Namibia, his battery died far from anyone. He built a ramp of rocks, rolled the vehicle down it and the engine caught.

What a joy. I clapped my hands for the Lord for ten minutes. Thank you, Lord! I had no voice left.— Koos van der Lende

He tells these stories, and many more, in his conversations with Martin Osner. Watch the films.

In 2016 Koos completed Moments of Grace, a linen cloth covered, hand assembled book in a handmade leather pouch, panoramic in shape and opening to a full metre wide, made only from film. In his own words it is a book that shows a God inspired passion for photography and His beautiful creation, and that aims to give the viewer a sense of peace and awe at the magnificence of our continent.

Amazing grace is to leave home and return after many weeks, unharmed, healthy and laden with images to share with the world, demonstrating God's greatness and faithfulness.— Koos van der Lende, Moments of Grace

After the book, Koos left Pretoria for a remote farm in Namaqualand, in the far north west of South Africa, close to the Richtersveld. It is one of the first landscapes he loved, a land of winter rain, Atlantic fog and, in a good year, flowers to the horizon. There is no signal on the farm. Every now and then he drives to the top of a hill to make contact with the world.