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Frans Lanting, GEO Magazine, February 1992
by Uta Henschel
“I don’t like to talk about that too much,” he said, looking out of the window over the dunes into the fog bank that moves from the Pacific onto the California coast almost every afternoon, where it stays until the next morning, a mellow mediator between sky and ocean, and ocean and land. The question which Frans Lanting avoids is supposed to lead to the topic of his work as a wildlife photographer.
His success came fast. He arrived at the peak of his profession in only ten years and has been able to add a new dimension to it. His stories, which normally take shape during long months on vacation, bring life to remote geographic names like South Georgia, Madagascar, Botswana, and often create the public image of these landscapes and animals for a worldwide audience.
In a few days Frans Lanting leaves for Borneo. Asking him for details of his plans, however, is not perceived as a polite interest and answers are diverted. “I’m superstitious. There is always the danger that one assumes to have everything under control--as if the subjects I want to photograph already belong to me.” And they do not.
This is it, the Lanting denial. Earlier than I expected, the pale eyes turn away. Someone hoping to learn more than is shown in Frans Lanting’s photographs is inevitably going to hit this barrier. It is almost a characteristic of the published reports about him and his work. His connection to the animals, which he observes and photographs for weeks and months on end, is too “private” to gossip about. It is a precious secret.
A lot of wildlife people exhibit this shyness and encode what animals mean to them in plain as well as touching statements: “It is an honor when a wild animal accepts me in its proximity.” This is how a life of strong emotions melts together in one sentence. However, someone who wants to get public recognition for his work, especially in America, has to serve with personal confessions.
For those occasions, Frans Lanting uses a metaphor which expresses a lot but reveals little. He compares himself to Nils Holgersson, the hero of a well-known Swedish children’s book by Selma Lagerlof. A young boy, shrunk to a dwarf by a magician, flies away with a flock of wild geese and gets to know the animal world from the inside out.
“As a wildlife photographer I’m just like him, an outsider who is accepted by the animals.” Thus, like all his previous projects, the success of the Borneo project depends as much on the readiness of the wild creatures as on the photographer and whether, for example, he brought enough batteries or has a courier taking his films immediately from the tropics to the lab. Frans wants to understand animals before he photographs them.
Frans Lanting read The Wonderful Journey of Nils Holgersson and other animal stories in Rotterdam when he was a boy, long before he thought about a career in photography. His first pictures, taken when he was 21 years old with his mother’s camera while hiking through national parks in the U.S., frustrated him tremendously because they did not reflect his own experience. He could not rest until he bought his own camera and started practicing with it. Without money to travel, he found his subjects close by in a Rotterdam city park.
He slipped into Nils Holgersson’s role for the first time as a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz when, instead of taking over his father’s business in Holland, he photographed his first animal story: “I climbed on the back of the geese, so to speak, and flew away.”
This is to be taken literally because he did flee from his planned life in Rotterdam. And then again, he did not: Frans Lanting did not follow wild geese but sandpipers on their migration along the Pacific coast and while doing so, he discovered his photographic style.
What he wanted more than anything else was to get as close as possible--he wanted to understand the birds before he photographed them. Thus, he allowed himself and the animals a lot of time. They could get used to him and accept his presence as another elevation at their horizon, like the sand dunes that border their habitat. The grown-up Frans Lanting “made himself small,” like Nils, before the shyness of the sea birds. Thus, knowing initially little about wild animals, he learned about their collective intelligence and their individual skills and experiences. He was fascinated by what he learned, and forgot everything around him, even himself.
Frans explains his success as a photographer with his work on sandpipers. At the same time something wonderful happened to him: He found in the reality of California what he had thought was just literature. “Out there,” and his eyes reflect the light of the skies under which all sandpipers travel, “the world out there lives according to its own rules.
In the “New Davenport Bed & Breakfast,” located along California Highway 1 and next to the Pacific, a highway for multitudes of migrating whales, sea lions, birds, fish, and butterflies, breakfast is served for a day in the field: two eggs over-easy, hash browns, bacon, toast, marmalade. “As a European, the vitality of this coast amazes me, despite the obvious urbanization and commercialization.” In the stream of his conviction, Frans Lanting becomes talkative. “This is not comparable to European nature preserves. Those are valued and protected but excluded from daily lives. Here, in California, there is still more of a real coexistence. Most people, however, don’t really think about the wildlife along the coast. They take it for granted and forget about it right away.”
People and wild animals each live in their own habitats but their paths cross as they go about their separate business. One group comes to Davenport for breakfast and the other flies to the beach to catch some worms or to dive for fish and abalone into the icy depth of the Pacific canyons. Frans searches for a picture that can express this unusual but common occurrence: “It is just as fantastic as if bison were still running through the suburbs of Chicago.”
These living possibilities that in Europe belong to the distant past determined California’s West coast as Lanting’s home. “It is a different world, filled with strange, wild creatures.”
When Frans walks through his neighborhood, whether it’s the highlands behind the cliffs where he has owned a house for two years, or along the beach, he anticipates meetings with great excitement. Everywhere, it seems, animals talk to him--just like old friends.The smooth face with the round, astonished look directed upwards, greets ravens with a shrill sound--and barks an answer to the sea lions on their rocks in the ocean.
“Good weather for migrating birds,” he remarks. Good for Año Nuevo, a cape that juts into the ocean a little north of Davenport. Opposite it is a small, flat island, one of the few along the entire Pacific coast. It is here that local birds mix with their migrating cousins, who continue their spring journey northwards. Their sounds drift through the fog bank, then a few dark spots appear and grow to markings, landing on the island or flying in close formations above the waves. In between, hundreds of birds in great variety paddle in the water.
The beach of the island is inhabited by long-staying guests who have taken up residence while they molt their fur: sea elephants--Frans Lanting’s next topic. For two years he shared the beach with them, was literally surrounded by those animals, overwhelmed by their vitality. For the sandpipers he made himself small so they would not feel threatened. With the sea elephants the same strategy served his own safety. The powerful seals claim a territory--the females for nurturing their young and the males for their status, together in a harem--and are ready to protect it at the slightest incident, even against people, especially those who walk upright. “Animals communicate a lot with body language and thus are very sensitive to what others are demonstrating with their bodies.” He who makes himself large appears aggressive.
From the elephant seals, Frans learned about the violent side of the wilderness--not directed at his own body, though. Trying to appear harmless, he crawled right through the colony on the island; today it is a protected area that only rangers and scientists are permitted to enter. He stayed night and day to get to now the rhythms that rule elephant seal behavior: little territorial fights among the cows, nonviolent power struggles among the young bulls. Frans did as his neighbor, whale scientist Ken Norris, recommended: “If you want to understand animals, crawl under their skin. You can image yourself to be a sea elephant by thinking of living in a sleeping bag, filled up with Jello.”
If Frans had any romantic ideas about the “harmony of nature,” they faded away with the sight of competition and procreation among the sea elephants: torn up trunks, bleeding wounds, pieces of flesh floating in the salt water, cows harassed by belligerent bulls, suckling babies crushed to death by their mothers’ heavyweight “lover.” “It overwhelmed me, affected my photography for several years, this experience of senseless violence, that lack of any compassion, a living hell.”
At the edge of the dunes in the beach grass, a pod of sleeping sea elephants lie close, side-by-side, a picture of lazy peace--except for a barely perceptible restlessness. The animals constantly sweep fins through the loose sand and, with casual twists, throw it up in the air into a spraying fountain which sends a fine layer of cooling grains directly onto their heated bodies. Since Frans photographed them ten years ago the population has increased. Cows, which were pushed away from favored places on the island into the surf where the chances for their babies’ survival were minimal, eventually dared to come to the mainland. “Because of genetic fears of grizzlies and other wild animals, they avoided the mainland for awhile. Only 200 years ago condors ate from the cadavers! It was really wild back then.”
Frans would have liked to have been there. He is not repelled by the horrors of nature. Instead he remarks about the lack of natural processes in today’s human society. “Institutions take care of our dead, even the experience of pain disappears from our existence. Our life today stands in contrast to life in nature. Out there”--he says this with respect-- “...out there is the jungle.”
Two bulls, their trunks puffed up, press against each other with their bodies raised up. As one staggers and moves backward, the other follows. It looks like they are attached at their bellies, Siamese sea elephants which move their bulk along the beach with hopping fat wrinkles. “Barely anywhere,” Frans Lanting says, “can life and death be seen so close to each other as in the nurseries of sea mammals and sea birds. Death comes fast and is agonizing in other places, too, but it is not as easy to observe. For example, where do all these thousands of birds die that live around us?”
He is often witness to the death of animals--he felt sorry for two young lion cubs in Botswana that were gone one night when their mother returned from hunting. He was shaken when wild dogs caught a gazelle one night and tore it apart within seconds. On a lake in Okavango, he watched pink clouds descend--thousands of flamingos, attracted by the rain which filled up a salt pan that had been dry for ten years. Fifty thousand died when the water evaporated. “Nature as it should be,” Frans Lanting comments. “Grandiose even as a catastrophe.”
His pictures are full of these messages. When wilderness does not allow for error or weakness, existence becomes a performance of individuals. Frans depicts animals as athletes, their perfect bearing and their powerful movements show total self-confidence. Sometimes extreme perspectives and dramatic light emphasize the symbolism of scenes in which animals try to avoid disaster by vigilance or stealth. His photos honor them as survivors of an uncertain past and as potential victims of a future accident. One moment of diminished strength or distracted attention can mean the end.
Frans misses this context of the reality of the natural world in most of the wildlife photography he sees in publications. In his opinion, many of those technically perfect, well-composed pictures banalize wildlife by neglecting the significance of behavior and the essence of an existence in nature. They are not much more than pin-ups.
In the past it irritated him to be characterized as a nature photographer. Ten years ago it meant you were a member of a fringe group which was not taken seriously. He wanted to be taken seriously. “Since then wildlife photography has become an important kind of photography because many people are now interested in conservation. The fact that a species is endangered can nowadays have consequences in international politics.”
He sees his work from Okavango in this context. While discussions are going on about how to save the last of Africa’s elephant herds from poachers, his photos demonstrate that there is a vital ecosystem in Botswana, today only known by a few people, yet one that is inhabited by a cornucopia of wildlife. “Such publicity is needed at this critical moment in history. Botswana’s government, just like Madagascar’s, is only beginning to understand the natural treasures they possess--in the long run, perhaps, a lot more valuable than their diamonds.”
The first publication of his photos in National Geographic resulted in a siege of the Botswana embassy in Washington by people who wanted to visit that country and start businesses there. Lanting would like to initiate something like that in Borneo, too. “What happens there is a catastrophe. The rain forests in Sarawak and Sabah are being cut down much faster than in the Amazon upon which so much more public attention is concentrated.”
Frans, however, believes in the effect of non-confrontational publications which show the beauty of a region and the importance of its natural world as a basis for sustaining a human environment. How delicate his course is, how great the danger of compromising himself, he knows--but he prefers to be able to “continue to negotiate and exert influence from within. In the wider cause of conservation, different strategies are needed to turn things around.”
Frans Lanting’s strategy is not a radical one. When responsible authorities in Botswana consider the killing of 2,000 to 3,000 elephants a year to limit the damage done to the vegetation in national parks and in surrounding cultivated areas, Frans has a definite opinion: He is against it. Shooting in the parks should not be allowed because they are parks and because too many tourists would be shocked witnesses. But, shooting outside the parks would lead to more elephants fleeing into the protected areas which would enlarge the whole problem instead of solving it.
But Frans Lanting does not wag the finger of the know-it-all: “We outsiders must not dictate to Botswana what to do. I think that, as a sovereign state, people over there have a right to determine if the culling is in the country’s and the elephants’ interest. However, I believe that the country might be better off not cutting into the last unharassed herds: it would be like cutting the world’s largest diamond into smaller pieces for profit.”
Frans Lanting’s photos show what he means: elephants as awe-inspiring monuments in the landscape, photographed from the perspective of the photographer laying on the ground--gigantic gray diamonds.
“My role is the one of a mediator. I stay with wild animals and then I come back to my own people to tell them about life in nature, just like Nils Holgersson.” The metaphor signals that another barrier is reached.
Leaning against the dunes, Frans Lanting blinks towards the ocean. His voice mixes with the sounds of this coastal wilderness, voices that come from the clouds, roar out of the bellies of the sea elephants and from far at sea. “Wosch!” he yells. And again, “Wosch! A whale! A half-kilometer out there, next to the cliffs.” Frans jumps up, stands there with his eyes reaching across the distance. Maybe, centuries ago, whale hunters stood there just like him, with this same passion, waiting for that mighty breathing visible in the distance, which signals the beginning of Spring.
“People like me are privileged. We have a chance to go to these last places on earth where nature still exists like the womb from which we came.” Frans Lanting speaks hesitatingly and with many pauses. He searches for a path between words which should not be articulated. He is afraid to violate the unwritten agreement that exists between him and wild animals. To detail his experiences any more would be to offer an explicit and fixed image of something which is in essence private and fluid.
There were times when Frans Lanting’s special gift was more like a public good. Back then people lived in the midst of wilderness and had to know it as well as the animals on whom they depended. But among the hunters of these early communities, there were always some who gained more than fresh meat from animals. From them stem our traditions and our myths, and also that magical cave art which does not just reflect a daily reality with its simple lines. Rather it conveys a special knowledge, perhaps a supernatural connection, now lost to most of us.
“It is a gift that only a few people have: to dive into nature and to experience the kind of connection with animals which I feel when I work with them for a long time.” How Frans Lanting turns that connection into photographic expressions is demonstrated very dramatically by one of his albatross photographs. A male albatross stretches his body and spreads his wings about two meters to the left and to the right. His breast is a white curve arched towards the light. Neck, head, and beak push straight up to the sky. It is a moment of ecstasy. The gesture seems to include the water sparkling in the sun, the clouds, and the distant horizon, and it radiates with extreme self-confidence; it is a sensation of life. On the grass in front of him is the one he woos. Head slightly bent and turned, she is looking up to him from down below. The photo condenses into a moment that can only be explained crudely in words. It encompasses what these two animals communicate to each other and what the photographer sensed about their lives. It allows a rare insight into their world.
These birds have little fear of humans. Thus, spending one week alone with them in the bleak Antarctic wildness of South Georgia Island and living out of a small tent, Frans could photograph them in immediate proximity.
“A young male albatross is born with the ability to enact the dozen or so sounds and gestures that make up his ritual courtship dance. But, as Duke Ellington said, ‘It don’t mean a think if it ain’t got that swing.’ The bird must practice until he gets it right, before other albatrosses will appreciate him as a suitor.” Frans Lanting realized something similar about sea elephants--the skill of talented individuals to improve themselves, while fighting, tricking, or bluffing with other bulls on the beach. “But optically this is much harder to express. Sea elephants do not behave with the same self-expression as albatrosses. Also, it is better not to hang around under the noses of those big bulls.”
This photographer’s experience with wildlife inspires his photographs. The stories they tell are his very personal experience, his interpretation, his reality--not anyone else’s. Someone who would go to the same places and watch the same animals would not have the same experience. It is a world that is only visible in Frans Lanting’s photos.
“If you have learned anything from this journey, Nils, you might no longer be of the opinion that man alone should rule the world,” Aka, the leader of the wild geese, says solemnly. “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.”
“I would like to help you with this very much. But I certainly do not have a lot of authority in the world of man,” Nils Holgersson sighs.
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