Shot during a 20,000 mile, eight-month overland expedition across South America, these photographs, printed on a monumental scale, capture the endless variety of South American vistas.

Alexander Lindsay (b. 1961) spent his early career as a documentary film-maker, shooting war reportage footage in the mountains of Afghanistan in the 1990s, gaining unprecedented access into both the Afghan mujahedeen rebel forces and the Soviet army for a trio of award-winning, critically acclaimed documentaries, ‘The Afghan Trilogy’. Lindsay also filmed extensively in Iraq during both of the Gulf Wars, producing the feature length documentary ‘Saddam’s Iraq’ from the only footage unvetted by Iraqi censors to ever leave the country during Saddam Hussein’s regime.

For ALTITUDE, Lindsay returns to his original practice of photography, which he studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, but his documentary project of revealing an underlying truth through material representation endures as a continuous thread in his work. Documentary photography in contemporary art continues as a prevalent mode of seeing the world, as notions of the objectivity of the camera are challenged by developing technologies. Like Andreas Gursky, Lindsay uses the raw material of photographs as documentary matter but the digital processing of this through the artist’s eye and hand is the artistic transformation of crude beginnings into an artwork. Whilst Gursky digitally layers photographs to reach a final piece, Lindsay digitally stitches images together to create these vastly wide panoramas, a combination of extraordinary feats of digital technology and the intricacies of an artist’s vision. Moreover, the process of producing the photograph in material form is an extremely physical process. Lindsay carries out the printing by hand in his studio in Scotland, printing on a vast yet highly detailed scale.

16 April - 20 June