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Frans Lanting Current Biography, 1995
by Miriam Helbok
By immersing himself intellectually, emotionally, and physically in the lives of wild animals ranging from elephants and lions to albatrosses and penguins, the internationally renowned Dutch-born photographer Frans Lanting has captured on film arresting images that illuminate seldom-seen aspects of the natural world and "excit[e] a sense of shared discovery for the viewer, a feeling of seeing a well-known creature as if for the first time," as Steven Werner wrote in Outdoor Photographer (May 1993). Lanting's photo-essays "bring to life remote geographic areas . . . and often even create the public image of these landscapes and animals for a worldwide audience," Uta Henschel observed in the German edition of GEO (February 1992). His pictures have also been credited with focusing attention on environmental problems and, in some cases, spurring governments and nongovernmental groups to act upon them. "I may be part of the last generation of photographers able to show wildlife in all its glory," Lanting observed to Michael McRae during an interview for Outside (October 1992). "The next generation may have better technology, but what wildlife will be left? Wherever I go I see whole ecosystems unraveling. The long-term pattern is the demise of wilderness as we know it. I'd rather go at a more leisurely pace, but I'm in a very privileged position, being the eyes of the world."
One of the most widely published photographers in his field, Lanting has contributed thousands of pictures to Natural History, Audubon, LIFE, the Italian nature magazine Airone, the German magazine Stern, and many other prestigious periodicals. On commissions from National Geographic, he has tackled difficult assignments in Antarctica, Madagascar, Botswana, and the rainforests of Borneo, Belize, Peru, and the Congo Basin, producing work of such outstanding quality that Wilbur Garrett, who served as the editor of National Geographic during the 1980s, came to regard him as "the finest nature photographer working today." "[His] aesthetic vision and knowledge of the subject matter are unlike those of any other natural history photographer [National Geographic] has used," according to Thomas R. Kennedy, the magazine's director of photography. "He's able to understand and anticipate animal behavior with the same kind of alacrity that a photojournalist would who is making pictures of people. The animals are unconscious of his presence, and as a result he can get closer." Lanting's photos illustrate ten books, four of which--Madagascar: A World Out of Time (1990), Peace on Earth (1993), Okavango: Africa's Last Eden (1993), and Forgotten Edens: Exploring the World's Wild Places (1993)--he wrote or co-wrote. Many of the seventy-five thousand images in his collection of color transparencies have appeared in other books as well, and also in advertisements, filmstrips, greeting cards, posters, and annual reports, among other vehicles. Lanting was named BBC Photographer of the Year in 1991.
Frans Lanting was born on July 13, 1951 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. As a child he identified closely with the hero of two children's books by the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlof, a boy named Nils Holgersson, who, after being shrunk by a magician to less than half his original size, joins a flock of wild geese and becomes an accepted member of the animal world. At one point the leader of the geese tells him, "If you have learned anything from this journey, Nils, you might no longer be of the opinion that man alone should rule the world. See, you people have so much land just for yourselves, so perhaps you could leave some marshy lakes and swamps and sea cliffs and distant forests to us. That way, we animals can live in peace. All my life I have been persecuted and hunted. It would be a good thing if creatures like us could find a refuge somewhere." In 1994 Lanting told an interviewer that Lagerlof's story "really set the stage for a lot of what [he is] doing now." He believes that, like Nils Holgersson, he plays the role of a "mediator" between humans and other species. "I stay with wild animals, and then I come back to my own people to tell them about life in nature," he has said.
At the age of twenty-one, Lanting spent a school holiday hiking and taking pictures in national parks in the United States. His photographs disappointed him, so, thinking that the fault lay with the camera, which he had borrowed from his mother, he bought himself a better one and began educating himself in its use in a Rotterdam city park and in the Dutch countryside. He also developed his skills by studying the work of established photographers and reading how-to articles. By his own account, he has been strongly influenced by "native ways of looking at animals," and through the years his imagination has been fired by cave paintings, Chinese landscape paintings, and other artworks. Lanting earned a Master's Degree in Environmental Economics from Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, in 1977. In 1978 he enrolled in a postgraduate program in environmental planning at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He left the program about two years later to devote himself full-time to photography, thereby reportedly dashing his family's hopes that he would someday take over his father's business. "I've always been interested in the natural world, and I love photography, so it seemed a good idea to combine the two," he told Cathy Joseph during an interview for Amateur Photographer (September 11, 1993). He also felt, as he explained to Antus M. Theurmer, Jr. for Jackson Hole (Winter 1994-95), that "a bad day in the field is better than a good day in the office." In 1980 a collection of Lanting's photographs of the Dutch landscape was published in the Netherlands, with the title Holland: The Magic of Reality. After abandoning his academic career, Lanting continued to live on the
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Dunlin, Monterey Bay, California
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California coast, where he found limitless inspiration and a wealth of wild subjects to photograph. "The vitality of this coast amazes me, despite the obvious urbanization and commercialization . . . ," he told Uta Henschel. "It is just as fantastic as if bisons were still running through the suburbs of Chicago." The sanderlings (a type of sandpiper) that foraged along the seashore fascinated Lanting, and he set about learning as much as he could about them. In line with what he has described as his "tendency . . . just to look for a neighborhood and make a commitment to a group of animals or a small patch of land," he observed them for weeks on end and even followed them for some distance when they migrated. In time he became intimately familiar not only with their behavior as a species but also with the idiosyncrasies of individual birds. As they got used to his presence, he was able to come increasingly close to them, and the birds eventually seemed to accept him as simply another feature of their environment. Lanting "discovered his photographic style" during his work with the sanderlings, Uta Henschel reported, and by his own account, that long-term project provided the foundation for his later success in photography. "Right from the start Frans had a deep, abiding love for the natural world," the photographer David Cavagnaro, with whom Lanting collaborated to produce the book Feathers (1982), told David M. Roth for Departures (September/October 1994). "That was apparent in his earliest work; and as a photographer I know the kind of hardship it takes to do the work he was doing. He would dog something endlessly until he got it, and he had the patience to sit quietly. Those are gifts few photographers really have."
"Animals communicate a lot with body language and thus are very sensitive to what others are demonstrating with their bodies," Lanting has observed. Lanting's highly developed ability to unobtrusively enter the worlds of animals--to live "eye to eye" with them and "com[e] to know their most intimate, desperate, and ordinary moments," in his words--has aided him not only when he photographs species that are skittish or shy, when his greatest risk is scaring his subjects away, but also when the objects of his attention are potentially dangerous: elephant seals, for example, which, in another of his major undertakings on the California coast, he began photographing in the early 1980s. Any action interpreted by the elephant seals as threatening, or as interfering with their searches for or defense of harems of females, might have resulted in his being killed by one or more of the adult males, which when fully grown may weigh more than three tons. In another instance, in Botswana Lanting photographed elephants while positioned within a stone's throw of them. While working in Africa, he also followed a pride of lions for a month, "liv[ing] with them as an auxiliary lion, so to speak," as he told Victor Goodpasture for Confettii (May/June 1992). One night the lions killed a giraffe, and, again from a distance of just a few feet, he spent hours photographing them as they devoured every part of the animal but the bones.
In what amounted to a veritable coup for a fledgling wildlife photographer whose career had not yet reached the three-year mark, Lanting's photo-essay "Elephants on the Beach" was published in January 1982 by the National Audubon Society's wildlife and conservation magazine Audubon. Later that year a photo-essay by him about the wildlife of California's Channel Islands was published in National Parks (July/August 1982); another story, illustrated with his photos of snow geese, appeared in the German edition of GEO (September 1982) and drew "international attention," according to Cathy Joseph. "Despite the routine nature of his early subjects," Steven Werner noted, "Lanting had a talent that made them appear novel and exotic. Through his lens, even a common beach scavenger like a seagull seemed remarkable."
"I try to control situations only to a point and then leave the door open to chance by allowing the animals choices or leeway, which then forces me to improvise and react," Lanting told Werner, in describing his working methods. "It becomes more of an interaction than a one-way street where an animal can do only one thing or stay in only one position. . . . My photographic approach has long been to show the context within which wildlife lives or has to live. . . . I try not to show only the totem animals, but include little critters that are often overlooked to show that they're all expressions of vital ecosystems. Beyond that, I go to great lengths to illustrate relevant connections between people and animals, be they positive or negative."
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Ring-tailed lemurs running, Madagascar
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In 1985 Lanting's career got another big boost, when National Geographic commissioned him to record on film the environmental crisis on Madagascar. Madagascar had not been explored in a modern sense," Lanting recalled during an interview with Tim Gallagher for Living Bird (Summer 1993). "It was very exciting to be in the vanguard, providing the first documentation of species that had never before been photographed. . . . I actually photographed a species of lemur that hadn't even been named yet. It doesn't get any more exciting than that, sitting face to face with an unknown primate, alongside the scientist who discovered it."
Acting in accordance with his conviction that the formula for success for someone in his realm of photography is "part science, part expedition skills, and part human relations skills," in his words, Lanting initiated many conversations with farmers, subsistence hunters, government officials, scientists, and other Malagasy during the year that he worked on Madagascar, and he thereby became intimately familiar with the country's economic and social problems as well as its environmental troubles. His thorough research, which also included extensive reading, "enabled him to make photos that were more moving than anything previously done on Madagascar," David M. Roth wrote. According to Roth, even if Lanting "had never snapped another frame [after leaving Madagascar], he would have been assured a place in photo history because of a single iconic image--that of a Malagasy tribesman clutching an enormous egg [that of an elephant bird, an extinct species] and spear."
Lanting's pictures of the land, people, and wildlife of Madagascar, which accompanied the article "Madagascar: A World Apart," in the February 1987 issue of National Geographic, and which subsequently appeared in many other periodicals, awakened a great deal of interest in Madagascar's multiple problems, and since the late 1980s scores of foreign scientists and conservationists, in collaboration with their Malagasy counterparts, have launched projects on the island with the linked goals of halting the destruction of the environment and combating the country's economic and social ills. With financial aid from the United States Agency for International Development and various conservation organizations, the Malagasy government has increased its annual support for parks and reserves from less than one thousand dollars to millions of dollars, and a growing tourism industry has bolstered the economy.
After the publication in National Geographic (December 1990) of Lanting's photographs of the wildlife of the eighty-five-hundred-square-mile Okavango Delta in Botswana, scores of Americans contacted the Botswana embassy in Washington for information about tours or the possibilities of starting businesses there. The publicity that that National Geographic issue generated also reportedly led the Botswana government to alter its policies regarding a portion of the delta so as to ensure its conservation. Lanting's impressions, in words as well as pictures, of the region appear in his book Okavango: Africa's Last Eden. In a review of the book for Photo District News (April 1994), in which she commented that "Lanting's commitment to wildlife photography is justly legendary," Nancy
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Elephants at Twilight, Botswana
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Madlin wrote, "It's hard to believe that, after we've seen so much, any book on African wildlife can still impress us to marveling. But that's exactly what this one does." In the Boston Globe, Mark Wilson, who called Lanting "perhaps the most versatile wilderness photographer working today," wrote, "The photographer wanting to learn from [his] pictures needn't go far into the book. Patterns, symmetry, eye shine, action, expressions, perspective, and color swirl about the viewer in a concert of the finest kind." "In documenting the cycles of the Okavango, Lanting's photographic skills are seemingly boundless," Ray Olson wrote in Booklist (November 15, 1993). "His viewpoints, lighting, backgrounds, and composition are unparalleled. From vast aerial shots to closeups of lionesses lapping water, each extraordinary photo conveys life and power and feeling."
In another enthusiastic assessment of Okavango, for the New York Times Book Review (January 9, 1994), the renowned zoologist George B. Schaller wrote, "[Lanting] celebrates the land and its wildlife with spare, evocative prose and with photographs that are extraordinary in capturing motion, form, and color. . . .[He] possesses not only the clear vision and technical virtuosity of the world's best outdoor photographers, he also has the unusual ability to create mood and mystery. . . . Lanting's photographs take creatures that have become ordinary and familiar and transform them into haunting new visions. . . . Admire this book for its beauty. But remember also that it bears witness to our moral obligation to protect a unique environment; it demands compassion, concern, action, and global commitment to help 'Africa's last Eden' endure."
Lanting's photos also illustrate The Total Penguin (1990), by James Gorman, and two books for younger readers by Sylvia A. Johnson--Elephant Seals (1989) and Albatrosses of Midway Island (1990). The pictures in Peace on Earth (1993) appeared first in fifty-two consecutive weekly Lanting portfolios in the Japanese magazine Asahi Graph, in 1992. Dozens of articles illustrated solely with his photos appear in other periodicals each year. Among other subjects, Lanting has created feature stories on the life cycle and migration of the monarch butterfly, penguins of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island, and the bonobo (known also as the pygmy chimpanzee), which lives in the Congo Basin. He spent one summer on the west coast of Canada, photographing Kwakiutl Indian artists who carve masks inspired by the natural world, and he took pictures of giant tortoises inside a volcano in the Galapagos Islands. In a remote region of the upper Amazon Basin, he focused on wild macaws while perched eighty feet above the forest floor on a tower that he had constructed to get treetop views. He has expressed the hope that his pictures of orangutans and other creatures on Borneo will help attract attention to the destruction of Borneo's tropical forests, which are disappearing even faster than the rainforests of Amazonia.
According to David M. Roth, Frans Lanting "looks more like a tweedy college professor than a camera-toting Crocodile Dundee. He's soft-spoken, mild-mannered, and unprepossessing. . . . His large doleful eyes are his most striking feature; in an instant they can switch from an unfathomable melancholy to a gleaming smile: a polarity of expression that reflects his having witnessed the extremes of earthly paradises (and their development-driven destruction)." Wilbur Garrett has observed that Lanting is "more meticulous than most people. And that goes for everything--from cutting his toenails to maintaining his cameras."
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Coastal fog and redwoods, Monterey Bay, California
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Lanting lives near Monterey Bay, a few miles from Santa Cruz, with the writer Christine K. Eckstrom, who edited his book Okavango and cowrote Forgotten Edens. Bobcats and coyotes sometimes wander into the meadow that surrounds their house, which, David M. Roth wrote, is "filled with African artifacts . . . all precisely placed." Lanting is a founding director of the North American Nature Photography Association, a columnist for Outdoor Photographer, and a roving editor for the National Wildlife Federation, and he serves on the board of the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund. In addition to the 1991 BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, which he received for his work in Botswana, Lanting's awards include top honors in the 1988 and 1989 World Press Photo competitions, for his images of Madagascar and Antarctica, respectively; a PATA (Pacific Asia Travel Association) Gold Award, for his photo-essay on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which appeared in the magazine Island; and, for his photos of Okavango, the 1993 Kodak Fotobuch Preis and the 1995 Kodak Fotokalener Preis. Selected Biographical References: Departures p124+ S/O '94 por; [KLM] Holland Herald p24+ S '93 por; Outdoor Photographer 9:34+ My '93 por; Wildlife Conservation 97:56+ My/Je '94 por.
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