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About the LIFE Project The Life Project is a lyrical interpretation of life on Earth from its earliest beginnings to its present diversity. It includes a large-format book, a multimedia orchestral performance, a traveling photographic exhibition, and a dedicated educational website, www.LifeThroughTime.com
LIFE: A Journey Through Time is presented as a photographic exhibition by Naturalis, the National Museum of Natural History of the Netherlands. After its opening on September 23, 2006, the exhibition is scheduled to tour through Europe and around the world. This dedicated educational website, www.LifeThroughTime.com, launched in September 2006. Biographies 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 two decades he has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to Antarctica. He portrays wild creatures as ambassadors for the preservation of complete ecosystems, and his many publications have increased worldwide awareness of endangered ecological treasures in far corners of the earth. Lanting’s work has been commissioned frequently by National Geographic, where he has served as a Photographer-in-Residence. His assignments have ranged from a search for the fabled bonobos of central Africa to a unique circumnavigation by sailboat of South Georgia Island in the sub-Antarctic. Images from his year long odyssey to assess global biodiversity at the turn of the millennium filled the February 1999 issue of National Geographic. Lanting’s recent assignments include profiles of global ecological hot spots, stories on Hawaii’s volcanoes and Zambia’s wildlife, and photo essays on American landscapes.
Lanting has received numerous prestigious awards. 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. He 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, and Sweden’s Lennart Nilsson Award. He has been honored as a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in London. Lanting is a Trustee of the Foundation Board of the University of California Santa Cruz. He serves on the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund and is a columnist for Outdoor Photographer. Born in the Netherlands, Frans Lanting now makes his home in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife, Christine Eckstrom, an editor, producer, and former staff writer at National Geographic with whom he collaborates on fieldwork and publishing projects. CHRISTINE ECKSTROM is a writer, editor, producer, and videographer. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she grew up in Washington, D.C., South Carolina, and New England. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, she is the author of Forgotten Edens: Exploring the World’s Wild Places (National Geographic Books), and is a contributing author of more than a dozen other books published by National Geographic, where she worked as a staff writer for 15 years. Field assignments have taken her to six continents to cover subjects ranging from wildlife in Namibia to a profile of Brazil’s Pantanal. Her stories have appeared in Audubon, International Wildlife, and National Geographic Traveler. She served as the editor for “Ideas and Images”, a collaboration between Barry Lopez and Frans Lanting. She edits “World View,” Frans Lanting’s column for Outdoor Photographer. Chris is the editor of Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden (Chronicle Books), Eye to Eye: Intimate Encounters With the Animal World (Taschen), Penguin (Taschen), and Jungles (Taschen), all of which were produced with her partner and husband, Frans Lanting.
Since 2000, Chris and Frans have undertaken assignments for National Geographic that have led them from the mountains of south India to the sub-Antarctic islands of New Zealand. Chris filmed and produced video stories about the assignments, and “The Cloud Goats of India,” was aired on the National Geographic Channel in 2002. She continues to document their fieldwork in video, and has several stories in production. Recent National Geographic assignments have taken Chris to the volcanoes of Hawaii, the Southwest’s Colorado Plateau, and Zambia’s Luangwa Valley.
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Chris has collaborated with Frans for more than a decade on fieldwork from the Amazon to Mongolia. In the 1990’s, book and magazine projects led them from Africa to Alaska, from Borneo to Botswana, and into the jungles of Peru. They have teamed up on fieldwork and photographic workshops in East Africa, the Galapagos, and Alaska, and on a video about Frans’s photography produced on location in Kenya. In the late 1990’s Chris and Frans worked in Australia and Central and South America for Frans’s yearlong project on global biodiversity for National Geographic. Following her six-week journey to Antarctica aboard a Russian icebreaker, Chris’s essay about emperor penguins, “Time on Ice,” appeared in Celebration of the Seas, published in 1998.