Nature Photographer, Conservationist, Author, and Public Speaker
Bay of Life: From Wind to Whales
Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. His influential work appears in books, magazines, and exhibitions around the world. For more than 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 about our living planet.
Lanting’s work has been commissioned frequently by National Geographic, where he served as a Photographer-in-Residence. In 2006, Lanting launched The LIFE Project, a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth, as a book, an exhibition, an interactive website, and a multimedia orchestral performance with
music by Philip Glass. The multimedia production of LIFE premiered in Santa Cruz, California, in 2006 and is currently touring North America and Europe.
Lanting’s books have received awards and acclaim: “No one turns animals into art more completely than Frans Lanting,” writes The New Yorker. His books include Bay of Life: From Wind to Whales (2022), Into Africa (2017), LIFE: A Journey Through Time (2006), Jungles (2000), Penguin (1999), Living Planet (1999), Eye to
Eye (1997), Bonobo (1997), Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden (1993 and 2012), Forgotten Edens (1993), and Madagascar, A World Out of Time (1990).
Lanting serves on the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund and on the Chairman’s Council of Conservation International, and he is a Trustee of the Foundation Board of the University of California Santa Cruz. Lanting has received top honors from World Press Photo, the title of BBC Wildlife Photographer of the
Year, and the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award. In 2018, Lanting was honored with the Wildlife Photographer of the Year’s first Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been honored as a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in London and is a recipient of Sweden’s Lennart Nilsson Award. In 2001 H.R.H. Prince Bernhard inducted him as a Knight in the Royal Order of the Golden Ark, the Netherlands’ highest conservation honor.