ALEXANDER LINDSAY – ALTITUDE
2015-04-20Puna, or altitude in the language of the Inca. A high plateau locked inside the Andes mountain range, in the heart of South America. Ancient, eternal, dangerous. At 16,000 feet oxygen is in debilitating short supply. Proximity to the sun means radiation exposure reaches perilous levels. Desert temperatures oscillate wildly between the scorching blaze of the midday sun and plummeting well below freezing as soon as darkness falls. Winds approaching speeds of 100 miles per hour tear across the plains, rendering all activity futile. This is a twilight zone. Desolate, at the edge of the known world, an expanse the human body cannot withstand and the human mind struggles to comprehend. Alexander Lindsay’s photographic series ALTITUDE captures in extraordinary detail across vast panoramic prints the exhilarating spectacle of these uninhabitable, primordial landscapes.
Uniting Lindsay’s journalistic background filming war reportage for documentary films in Iraq and Afghanistan, with his pioneering technological developments to film the Titanic wreck at ocean depths of 13,000 feet with his formal training at Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, Lindsay seeks to reveal, as he terms it, “reality at its most stark”. This is our earthly paradise at its most astonishing, laying bare the multitude of unimaginable wonders of the natural world. These are, Lindsay continues, “places where imagination is rendered futile”. In Jungle Glacier an extraordinary glacier wall l is suspended in volatile solidity. A lone upright stone, the Guardian of Tara, withstands elemental assaults of wind and snow. Thousands of pink flamingos congregating on a far-off lake are rendered in overwhelming precision in Distant Flamingos on Salar de Tara. A city sprawls below the looming watchful presence of the vast sand dune of Dragon Hill. Iridescent jewel-like colours of rock and water sparkle across the subaquatic Marble Caves I.
Opposite – Jungle Glacier, 2013
Exhibition runs through to June 7th, 2015
Piano Nobile
Kings Place
90 York Way
London
N1 9AG
