Background
Lanting was born on 13th July 1951 in Netherlands. He later moved to the United States.
Frans Lanting and wife and partner Chris Eckstrom, a writer and videographer, in Senegal in 2007.
Frans Lanting in Kenya in 2011.
Videographer Chris Eckstrom and her husband photographer Frans Lanting hid inside a concrete bunker by a water hole in Namibia in 2009 to capture images of animals that came to drink there.
Photographer photojournalist scientist
Lanting was born on 13th July 1951 in Netherlands. He later moved to the United States.
Frans was educated in the Netherlands. He earned a master’s degree in economics then moved to the United States to study environmental planning.
For three decades he has documented wildlife from the Amazon to Antarctica to promote understanding about the Earth and its natural history through images that convey a passion for nature and a sense of wonder and concern about our living planet.
Lanting’s work has been commissioned frequently by National Geographic, where he served as a Photographer-in-Residence. His assignments have ranged from a first look at the fabled bonobos of the Congo to a circumnavigation by sailboat of South Georgia Island in the subantarctic. In a remote part of the Amazon Basin, he spent weeks on platform towers to obtain rare tree-canopy views of wild macaws. He has lived for months with seabirds on isolated atolls in the Pacific Ocean, tracked lions through the African night, and camped among giant tortoises inside a volcano in the Galápagos.
Lanting did pioneering work in Madagascar, where he documented wildlife and tribal traditions never photographed before. His celebrated coverage of the Okavango Delta in National Geographic has been credited with inspiring a surge of international interest in wildlife and conservation in Botswana. His photo essays about rainforest ecology in Borneo, emperor penguins in Antarctica, and the troubled fate of puffins in the North Atlantic, have been featured in publications around the world. Images from his yearlong odyssey to assess global biodiversity at the turn of the millennium filled an issue of National Geographic.
Lanting’s work also includes profiles of ecological hot spots from India to New Zealand, as well as features on the majesty and plight of albatrosses, the nearly extinct Asiatic cheetahs in Iran, and a remarkable study of chimpanzees in Senegal that is shedding new light on human evolution.
A Journey Through Time is Lanting’s lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth from the Big Bang to the present. The LIFE Project was launched as a book, an exhibition, and a multimedia symphony with music by Philip Glass. The LIFE symphony premiered in Santa Cruz, California, and continues to tour North America and Europe. It has been performed more than two dozen times in major concert halls including New York’s Lincoln Center and the Barbican in London, and for special occasions including the inauguration ceremony for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and the World Wildlife Fund’s 50th Anniversary gala at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, attended by Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands.
His work on rainforest animals and plants was exhibited in 2005 in Field Museum of Natural History. The show was called, Jungles. A year later, his work was included in the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California. The exhibition was named, Life: A Journey Through Time and it combined Philip Glass‘s music with his photographic pieces. In the same year 2006, a traveling exposition of his work took place in Leiden’s natural history museum – called, Frans Lanting: LIFE. The retrospective traveled across the United States and Europe. Twelve years later, in 2012 an exhibition took place at the SS Rotterdam with seventy five images from the last show, Life: A Journey Through Time.
From May through July 2012 there was an exhibition with 75 photos from Life: A Journey Through Time on the SS Rotterdam in the harbour of Rotterdam.
In August 2012 Lanting became an ambassador of the World Wide Fund for Nature in the Netherlands. On August 25, 2012 a special concert version of LIFE was held in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam celebrating 50 years of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Lanting immerses himself physically, emotionally and intellectually in the lives of plants and animals, such as lions, elephants, penguins and albatrosses. He arrests photos that elucidate those aspects of nature that are rarely seen. His images excite the viewer, since Lanting shares his discovery with them.
His work has been accredited for making people aware of problems in the environment, and sometimes becoming a catalyst for non-governmental and governmental actions to find the solution.
In an interview, he warned that the generations to come will definitely have much better technologies, however what will be left of the wildlife to even photograph. Since Lanting keeps visiting places around the world, he realizes more how the ecosystems are unraveling. The ultimate pattern in the end of wilderness. In this case, Lanting’s photography serves a great purpose – his lens is the eye of the world.
He is a member of American Society Media Photographers (member of advisory board North Carolina chapter since 1993), North America Nature Photography Association (board directors since 1993), World Wildlife Fund United States of America (councillor 1995, editorial consultant since 1993).
He is also a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP).
Quotes from others about the person
“Frans Lanting has set the standards for a whole generation of wildlife photographers,” according to the BBC. “Mr. Lanting’s photographs take creatures that have become ordinary and transform them into haunting new visions,” writes acclaimed field biologist Dr. George Schaller in The New York Times. “As a chronicler of natural history today, Frans Lanting is a singular, extraordinary talent,” says Thomas Kennedy, former Director of Photography at National Geographic. “He has the mind of a scientist, the heart of a hunter, and the eyes of a poet.”
His books have received awards and acclaim: "No one turns animals into art more completely than Frans Lanting," wrote the New Yorker.