Frans Lanting
Frans Lanting was born July 13th, 1951 in Rotterdam, Holland. Specializing in wildlife photography, he is a Dutch nature photographer who currently lives in Santa Cruz, California, America.
Lanting went to Erasmus University in Rotterdam, earning a Master’s Degree in Environmental Economics in 1977. Emigrating to the U.S., he then enrolled in a postgraduate program in environmental planning at the University of California in Santa Cruz, which he left two years later to concentrate on photography.
Living on the California coast, he found inspiration and was not short of wild subjects to photograph. He described it to Uta Henschel as “It is just as fantastic as if bisons were still running through the suburbs of Chicago.” Lanting would observe them so much that he became familiar with their behaviour as a species, which enabled him to get even closer the more they got used to him. His ability to be unobtrusive towards animals and to live alongside them meant that not only could he photograph them without scaring them away, but also animals that could be potentially dangerous were more at ease with him. These include elephant seals (when felt threatened they can easily kill), which he began photographing on the California coast in the early 1980s. In Botswana he photographed elephants and lions in Africa, where he followed a pride for a month, capturing their hunt one night in which they devoured every part of a giraffe but the bones.
In 1985, Frans Lanting’s career got a boost when National Geographic commissioned him to record (on film) the environmental crisis in Madagascar. It had not been explored much prior to this point, therefore he would be documenting species that had never been seen before, including what turned out to be a species of lemur that hadn’t been named.
Lanting has illustrated many books with his photographs including ‘The Total Penguin’ (by James Gorman,1990) and ‘Elephant Seals’ (by Sylvia A. Johnson, 1989).
He has also created feature stories in magazines such as of the life cycle and migration of the monarch butterfly, and penguins of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island.
Not only photographing for himself, he photographs with the hope that showing pictures of orangutans and other creatures that live in Borneo’s tropical forests will attract attention to the destruction of such forests.
Frans Lanting currently lives near Monterey Bay (a few miles from Santa Cruz), with writer Christine K. Eckstrom who edited one of his books. He is a founding director of the ‘North American Nature Photography Association’, a columnist for ‘Outdoor Photographer’ and an editor for the ‘National Wildlife Federation’ and is also a photographer – in – residence at National Geographic Magazine. In addition to this. he also serves on the board of the ‘National Council of the World Wildlife Fund’, and has won countless awards from BBC1s ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year award’, to top honours in the 1988 and 1989 ‘World Press Photo competition’. He has even been knighted by H.R.H. Prince Bernhard in the Royal Order of the Golden Ark, the Netherland’s highest conservation honor (2001).
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