Lanting, Eye to Eye Taschen 45984

Animal People: The kinship of all life on earth

Eye to Eye, the first personal portfolio by master photographer Frans Lanting, presents an extraordinary collection of animal images by an award-winning photographer and naturalist who “has set the standards for a whole generation of wildlife photographers,” according to the BBC.

More than 140 photographs, made over a period of twenty years, reveal the unique personal aesthetic Frans Lanting brings to wildlife photography, as well as the startling new perspective on animals his images provoke. In a review of his work The New York Times states, “Mr. Lanting’s photographs take creatures that have become ordinary and familiar and transform them into haunting new visions.”

This book’s exquisite images are accompanied by personal stories and observations from a lifetime of working with wild animals around the world, ranging from orangutans in the rain forests of Borneo to emperor penguins in Antarctica. Few people have come face to face with such an array of creatures–and no one has portrayed them like Lanting. “Living with albatrosses on a small island in the Pacific Ocean, roaming with a troop of lemurs through a forest in Madagascar–those were times when I learned to see the world through other eyes,” Lanting says. “But what my eyes seek in these encounters is not just the beauty traditionally revered by wildlife photographers,” he writes. “The perfection I seek in my photographic compositions is a means to show the strength and dignity of animals in nature.”

Frans Lanting’s work has been lauded by designers as art, by biologists as science, and by others as a new vision of the relationship between animals and people–one that challenges us to look animals in the eye and see ourselves.