Eye to Eye: Intimate Encounters with the Animal World

Eye to Eye: Intimate Encounters with the Animal World by Lanting, Frans. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9783822828304.

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. Lantings photographs take creatures that have become ordinary and familiar and transform them into haunting new visions."" This books 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. More than 70 species are represented in this astonishing portrait gallery celebrating the diversity of life on earth. Frans Lanting does not seek in these encounters the beauty traditionally revered by wildlife photographers: ""The perfection I seek in my photographic compositions is a means to show the strength and dignity of animals in nature."" Frans Lantings 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.