L I N D E W A I D H O F E R / A B O U T T H E A R T I S T
FOR LINDE WAIDHOFER landscape photography is as much passion as profession. She works almost exclusively in color, formerly in 35mm and 6-by-17cm film; and today with state-of-the-art digital cameras. She has published five books of landscape photography: High Color, Spectacular Wildflowers of the Rockies; two large-format books on the desert southwest, Red Rock, Blue Sky and Stone & Silence; a smaller monograph format book on the marble caverns of Patagonia, Blue Light and, most recently, Forests of Light, a visual exploration of the aspen forests of the Rockies.
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 she lives near 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 tries to spend at least six months a year on the road, exploring and photographing new landscapes.
Her latest photographic adventure has been an ongoing exploration of Patagonia, the southernmost end of South America, a landscape of incredible beauty, relatively unvisited, unknown, and almost unphotographed. And she currently contributes photographs to a number of important environmental campaigns seeking to protect the pristine Patagonian landscape from the threat of industrial development.