FOR LINDE WAIDHOFER landscape photography is as much passion as profession. She works almost exclusively in color, formerly with 35mm and 6-by-17cm film; and today with state-of-the-art digital cameras. She has published nine books of landscape photography: High Color, Spectacular Wildflowers of the Rockies; three large-format books on the desert southwest, Red Rock, Blue Sky, Stone & Silence and Bisti; and Forests of Light, a visual exploration of the aspen forests of the Rocky Mountains. Her passion for Paagonia in recent years has resulted in four books: Unknown Patagonia, The Carretera Austral, South America's Most Spectacular Highway, and Chelenko, the Thousand and One Faces of a Patagonian Lake; plus a small monograph-format book on the marble caverns of Patagonia, Blue Light.

Linde searches for the photographic equivalent of the emotional impact of wild and mysterious landscapes. She finds this equivalent in the secret geometry and design beneath the surface of the natural world, in images of simplicity and abstraction. Linde loves the wildest corners of the West, natural light and changing weather. Linde’s stock photography is represented by Mountain Light Pictures in California. Her Western landscapes have appeared in National-Geographic and Sierra-Club books, and in magazines in Germany, Italy and the US. She has photographed assignments from Japan and New Zealand to Alaska and the Alps.

Today Linde's home base is Crestone, in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, under the 14,000-foot summits of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, just north of the Great Sand Dunes, in a house she designed and built with her husband. From this base, Linde has always tried to spend at least six months a year on the road, exploring and photographing new landscapes. Over a decade ago, this ongoing seach for new, magical, and poetic landscapes led Linde and her husband to Chilean Patagonia, a remote region in the far, far south of South America. Exploring Patagonia has become her latest photographic adventure. Patagonia is a landscape of incredible beauty, relatively unvisited, relatively unknown, and almost unphotographed. She currently contributes photographs to a number of important environmental campaigns seeking to protect the pristine Patagonian landscape from the threat of industrial development. And she has celebrated her passion for Patagonia in a seires of handsome large-format photo books, also available as elelctronic editions.