Product Description

Planet earth - home sweet home. In the year 2000, world-renowned wildlife photographer, Frans Lanting set out on a personal journey to photograph the evolution of life on earth. He made pilgrimages to true time capsules like a remote lagoon in Western Australia, spent time in research collections photographing forms of microscopic life, and even found ways to create visual parallels between the growth of organs in the human body and the patterns seen on the surface of the earth. The resulting volume is a glorious picture book of planet earth depicting the amazing biodiversity that surrounds us all. Lanting's true gift lies beyond his technical mastery: it is his eye for geometry in the beautiful chaos of nature that allows him to show us the world as it has never been seen before. From crabs to jellyfish, diatoms to vast geological formations, jungles to flowers, monkeys to human embryos, "Life" is a testament to the magical beauty of life in all its forms and is Lanting's most remarkable achievement to date.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24437 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 303 pages

About the Author
Dutch-born Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. For the past two decades he has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to Antarctica. Exhibits of his photographs have been shown at major museums in Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York, Madrid, and Amsterdam. Lanting's previous TASCHEN titles include Eye to Eye, Jungles, and Penguin. Christine Eckstrom is a writer and editor specializing in natural history. She collaborates with Lanting on fieldwork, books, and other publishing projects from their home base in California.

Customer Reviews

Science and Art in Photography
I've just finished looking at the many, absolutely beautiful photographs and reading the enlightening, though brief text in this fantastic book. It is unbelievable how Frans Lanting succeeds by present-day photos in guiding one from the beginnings of the planet Earth to the formation of the atmosphere and the development of life in water, then on land, of plants and animals. The idea of illustrating Creation in this manner is in itself fascinating, but its execution by means of such excellent photos - many of them taken over the years under hardship and danger - is simply breathtaking. This book is an acquisition I'm most happy about and which I will cherish always.

The Best Photography You Will Ever See
'Life' is a photographical history of life on Earth from its formation to the present day. Representation of the distant past is achieved using present day equivalence to provide images equating to scenes of billions of years ago. Later in the book Lanting uses museum specimens, animal collections and wildlife photography to provide the images from more modern times.

The photography is awe-inspiring, fully exposing the beauty of the natural world to its full. The book is large in all dimensions and the huge double page spreads allow for spectacular panoramas or exquisite detail depending on the subject. Lanting uses all the resources available to the modern photographer to maximise the effects.

This does bring a couple of drawbacks. Firstly its size and weight make it hard to read away from a table. Secondly, to avoid detracting from the photographs, the captions are placed at the end of the book, so you have to constantly refer back from each photograph, which is awkward, annoying, and frankly exhausting.

The book has virtually no text and for me this detracts from its value. You don't really learn much, and even with proper appreciation of the photography it only takes 2 or 3 hours to read cover to cover. Therefore if your only planning to read it once it's probably not worth the £20.

Overall this is wildlife photography at its finest and if your likely to appreciate it and refer back to it time and again then it is certainly worth buying. If not you should still experience it and borrow it from a library.