Frans Lanting:
A Journey Through Time
A world in the throes of creation. The mysterious beauty of a single cell. Fragile jellyfish and spiny octopus trees. In “Life: A Journey Through Time,” renowned photographer Frans Lanting takes a lyrical photographic look at the immensity of time covered by the history of life on Earth.
In addition to a photo book, educational website, and traveling exhibition, Lanting’s project includes a spellbinding multimedia work orchestrated to the music of one of America’s most acclaimed composers: Philip Glass.
Projected onto an enormous screen suspended above the orchestra, “Life: A Journey Through Time” premiered July 2006 to multiple standing ovations at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, which commissioned the project. Performances also are planned for Los Angeles, Baltimore, and other cities.
A Window to the Past
Inspiration for “Life: A Journey Through Time” began when the Dutch-born Lanting — who looks more like a college professor than the Edmund Hillary of photography — stood at the tide line of an estuary, taking pictures of horseshoe crabs crawling out of the water. It struck him that the crabs were a sort of time capsule: Hundreds of millions of years ago, virtually identical creatures were doing the same thing.
Driven by curiosity and wonder, Lanting spent the next seven years working on every continent to capture images of life forms from creatures immortalized in fossils to giant tortoises and landscapes that call to mind a world from three billion years ago, before the sky was blue.
Throughout, he consulted with leading scientists in evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology to home in on the images that could tell Earth’s four-and-a-half-billion-year story, from its cosmic origins to the presence of life as an irrepressible force in its own right.
Digital Over, Under and Up
Lanting worked by twilight and moonlight, on land, under water, in the air. At the blistering fringe of active volcanoes, he wore a respirator against the caustic fumes that corrode cameras and lungs alike. Under water, gear that was cumbersome and awkward on land became, Lanting writes, “a weightless window into a world of fluid motion, as I floated around coral reefs searching for early forms of marine life.”
And in the turbulent air of Alaska’s wilderness valleys, Lanting fitted his cameras with stabilizing gyros and shot from the cramped cabin of an open Piper Super Cub.
For the first several years of the project, Lanting made images on traditional film, though he has used Macs to edit his images and operate his studio “ever since the first ones came out.” But halfway through shooting, he says, “we went from being a film-dependent photography operation to being totally digitized.”
A Lab in Hand
Lanting switched to digital shooting, he says, because “in a matter of two years, the right cameras, the right hardware, and the right software all became available. With Nikon’s flagship D2X cameras, the quality of digital images is no longer in question, and the process is so much more streamlined now. At the same time, traveling around with film post-9/11 has become evermore complicated.”
For himself, Lanting adds that there are no labs around the corner when he travels to remote locations. “It is an enormous advantage to see on location what I’m doing, especially when I work with sophisticated lighting solutions or with other tricky situations,” he says.
In the field, Lanting and his wife, longtime National Geographic writer and videographer Christine Eckstrom, review and edit images on MacBook Pro laptops — sometimes plugging them into car batteries or solar panels when no other source of power is available.
“Editing images in the field and delivering them back to the studio has undergone an enormous change,” Lanting points out. “The responsibility of carrying around a couple of hundred rolls of exposed film has always been a burden. With digital images, I can just copy them onto another hard drive and FedEx it from the bush to the studio and we’re safe. With multiple backups in the field, it’s a revolution.”
