Eliot Porter – In contrast with Ansel Adams’ big landscape style, Porter’s photos were more “quiet” and focused on the intimate landscape scenes that are easily overlooked. It is easy to overlook his body of work in favor of postcard views but one needs to only look at the photographers that he influenced to see that his work has left a lasting impact. Photographers including William Neill and Charlie Cramer have styles that bear a strong resemblance to Porter’s vision. His most famous body of work is arguably the book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.
Initially, Porter took up a career as a biochemical researcher at Harvard. But he could never quite let go of his love of photography. Spurred by support from his brother, the realist painter Fairfield Porter, and introductions in the mid-1930s to the acclaimed artist-photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, he found himself increasingly photographing the northern New England landscape. In 1938 Stieglitz offered to exhibit some of these black-and-white photographs, along with several images that Porter made on an excursion to Austria, at his important New York City gallery, An American Place. That one-person show signaled Porter as a leading artist, on a par with such respected photographers as Paul Strand, Adams, and Stieglitz himself. It induced Porter to quit his medical career and take up photography full-time. But rather than continue to work in black and white, Porter almost immediately took up color to create more accurate photographs of birds. Soon he added other woodland subjects to his repertoire and became the first established artist-photographer to commit to exploring the colorful beauty and diversity of the natural world.
Over much of Porter’s career, black-and-white photography continued to set the artistic standard, and he had to fight his colleagues’ prejudices against the medium. But in 1962 he gained a major boost when the Sierra Club published "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World." That immensely popular book, combining his evocative color photographs of New England woods with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized photographic book publishing by setting new standards for design and printing and proving the commercial viability of fine art photography books. Its success set Porter on a lifelong path of creating similar photographic portraits of a wide variety of ecologically significant places the world over.
Building on the success of "In Wildness" and subsequent photographic celebrations of Glen Canyon (in Utah), Maine, and the Adirondacks, Porter moved increasingly farther afield to photograph and complete books heralding more distant and unusual sites. Such places included Baja California, Mexico, the Galápagos, East Africa, and Antarctica, all of which drew his attention because of their ecological diversity and the environmental stresses they faced. In the late 1960s, he added cultural topics to his agenda, eventually completing photographic studies of classical Greek sites, ruins of ancient Egypt, and modern China. All told, the artist published twenty-five books and was working on several more when he died in 1990.
Porter never gave up his passion for birds, continuing to photograph them almost every spring until failing health in the 1980s prevented that often strenuous work. He always remained fascinated by the scientific and ecological underpinnings of his subjects, be they animal, plant, or mineral. In the 1950s he would at times set himself such tasks as photographing new-born spiders or the life cycle of a mosquito. Lichen was one of his favorite subjects; he sought it out wherever he traveled. The publication of James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) led him to review his life’s work in recognition of his own implicit illustration of Gleick’s influential theory.
Ansel Adams – The grandfather of landscape photography. He is the one nature photographer that transcends the genre and even photography for that matter. His images are so well-known that photographers and tourists-alike are still trying to fill his tripod holes 60 – 70 years after his most famous images were made. Perhaps his greatest legacy were his environmental conservation efforts with the Sierra Club that led to creation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks among other areas, and also the art education institutions that he helped to create.
Frans Lanting - 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. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, he earned a master’s degree in economics then moved to the United States to study environmental planning. Soon after, he began photographing the natural world–and never turned back.
For three decades he has documented wildlife from the Amazon to Antarctica to promote understanding about the Earth and its natural history through images that convey a passion for nature and a sense of wonder about our living planet.
“Frans Lanting has set the standards for a whole generation of wildlife photographers,’’ according to the BBC. “Mr. Lanting’s photographs take creatures that have become ordinary and transform them into haunting new visions,” writes field biologist Dr. George Schaller in The New York Times. “As a chronicler of natural history today, Frans Lanting is a singular, extraordinary talent,” says Thomas Kennedy, former Director of Photography at National Geographic. “He has the mind of a scientist, the heart of a hunter, and the eyes of a poet.”
Lanting’s work is commissioned frequently by National Geographic, where he served as a Photographer-in-Residence. His assignments have ranged from a first look at the fabled bonobos of the Congo to a unique circumnavigation by sailboat of South Georgia Island in the subantarctic. In a remote part of the upper Amazon Basin, he spent weeks on platform towers to obtain rare tree-canopy views of wild macaws. He has lived for months with seabirds on isolated atolls in the Pacific Ocean, followed lions through the African night, and camped among giant tortoises inside a volcano in the Galápagos.
Lanting did pioneering work in Madagascar, where he documented wildlife and tribal traditions never photographed before. His celebrated coverage of the Okavango Delta in National Geographic has been credited with inspiring a surge of international interest in wildlife and conservation in Botswana. His photo essays about rainforest ecology in Borneo, emperor penguins in Antarctica, and the troubled fate of puffins in the North Atlantic, have been featured in publications around the world. Images from his year-long odyssey to assess global biodiversity at the turn of the millennium filled an issue of National Geographic.
Lanting’s work also includes profiles of ecological hot spots from India to New Zealand, as well as features on the majesty and plight of albatrosses, the last of the Asiatic cheetahs in Iran, and a remarkable study of chimpanzees in Senegal that is shedding new light on human evolution.
In 2006, Lanting launched The LIFE Project, a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth from the Big Bang to the present, as a book, an exhibition, an interactive website (www.LifeThroughTime.com), and a multimedia orchestral performance with music by Philip Glass. The symphonic version of LIFE premiered in Santa Cruz, California, in 2006 and has been touring North America and Europe ever since. ORIGINS, a new multimedia production based on LIFE, was performed in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2008, at the official ceremony to inaugurate CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the largest machine ever built to study the origins of the universe. LIFE was performed at the Lincoln Center in New York in 2009 to launch the World Science Festival and to honor the distinguished biologist Dr. E. O. Wilson, and in 2012 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands attended a performance of LIFE at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam during a gala event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the World Wildlife Fund.
Lanting’s books have received awards and acclaim: “No photographer turns animals into art more completely than Frans Lanting,” writes The New Yorker. His books include Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden (1993, 2012), Life: A Journey Through Time (2006), Jungles (2000), Penguin (1999), Living Planet(1999), Eye to Eye (1997), Bonobo (1997), Forgotten Edens (1993), Madagascar, A World Out of Time (1990), Islands of the West (1986), and Feathers (1982). In 2000, his book Eye to Eye was named by National Public Radio-KQED as one of the 50 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.
Lanting has received many honors for his work. 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. He has been honored as a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in London and is a recipient of Sweden’s Lennart Nilsson Award.
Lanting’s fine art prints are represented in many public and private collections, and he has had more than one hundred solo exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world. Three of his images were selected by his peers for a charity auction at Christie’s that featured the forty most important photographs of nature ever made.
Lanting’s mission is to use photography to help create leverage for conservation efforts ranging from local initiatives to global campaigns, through his publications, alliances, public appearances, and active support of environmental organizations. He serves as an Ambassador for the World Wildlife Fund Netherlands, and on the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund USA, as well as on the Leadership Council of Conservation International, and on the International Board of WildAid. Lanting is a Trustee of the Foundation Board of the University of California Santa Cruz, and is an honorary Director of the Friends of Long Marine Lab. He is a columnist for Outdoor Photographer, a co-founder of the North American Nature Photographers Association (NANPA), and a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP).
Frans Lanting makes his home in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and partner, Chris Eckstrom, an editor, videographer, and former staff writer at National Geographic with whom he collaborates on fieldwork and publishing projects.
John Shaw – The author of several best-selling nature photography how-to books he is often credited with helping beginning photographers to improve their photography and is still a leading figure in the workshop market today
John has been a professional nature photographer since the early 1970s. His work has been published in many publications and books, including National Geographic, Nature’s Best, National Wildlife, Audubon, Outdoor Photographer, and many others. In 1997 he received the first-ever Outstanding Photographer Award given by NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association). Nikon chose him as a featured Legend Behind the Lens in 2002, while Microsoft designated him an Icon of Imaging in 2006. He has been part of Epson’s Stylus Pro fine art print makers group since 2001.
John has published six books on nature photography, eight eBooks on Photoshop and Lightroom, plus two eBooks of photographs. A new work, John Shaw’s Guide to Digital Nature Photography, is scheduled for publication in early 2015. He has photographed on every continent, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Provence to Patagonia.
Initially, Porter took up a career as a biochemical researcher at Harvard. But he could never quite let go of his love of photography. Spurred by support from his brother, the realist painter Fairfield Porter, and introductions in the mid-1930s to the acclaimed artist-photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, he found himself increasingly photographing the northern New England landscape. In 1938 Stieglitz offered to exhibit some of these black-and-white photographs, along with several images that Porter made on an excursion to Austria, at his important New York City gallery, An American Place. That one-person show signaled Porter as a leading artist, on a par with such respected photographers as Paul Strand, Adams, and Stieglitz himself. It induced Porter to quit his medical career and take up photography full-time. But rather than continue to work in black and white, Porter almost immediately took up color to create more accurate photographs of birds. Soon he added other woodland subjects to his repertoire and became the first established artist-photographer to commit to exploring the colorful beauty and diversity of the natural world.
Over much of Porter’s career, black-and-white photography continued to set the artistic standard, and he had to fight his colleagues’ prejudices against the medium. But in 1962 he gained a major boost when the Sierra Club published "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World." That immensely popular book, combining his evocative color photographs of New England woods with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized photographic book publishing by setting new standards for design and printing and proving the commercial viability of fine art photography books. Its success set Porter on a lifelong path of creating similar photographic portraits of a wide variety of ecologically significant places the world over.
Building on the success of "In Wildness" and subsequent photographic celebrations of Glen Canyon (in Utah), Maine, and the Adirondacks, Porter moved increasingly farther afield to photograph and complete books heralding more distant and unusual sites. Such places included Baja California, Mexico, the Galápagos, East Africa, and Antarctica, all of which drew his attention because of their ecological diversity and the environmental stresses they faced. In the late 1960s, he added cultural topics to his agenda, eventually completing photographic studies of classical Greek sites, ruins of ancient Egypt, and modern China. All told, the artist published twenty-five books and was working on several more when he died in 1990.
Porter never gave up his passion for birds, continuing to photograph them almost every spring until failing health in the 1980s prevented that often strenuous work. He always remained fascinated by the scientific and ecological underpinnings of his subjects, be they animal, plant, or mineral. In the 1950s he would at times set himself such tasks as photographing new-born spiders or the life cycle of a mosquito. Lichen was one of his favorite subjects; he sought it out wherever he traveled. The publication of James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) led him to review his life’s work in recognition of his own implicit illustration of Gleick’s influential theory.
Ansel Adams – The grandfather of landscape photography. He is the one nature photographer that transcends the genre and even photography for that matter. His images are so well-known that photographers and tourists-alike are still trying to fill his tripod holes 60 – 70 years after his most famous images were made. Perhaps his greatest legacy were his environmental conservation efforts with the Sierra Club that led to creation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks among other areas, and also the art education institutions that he helped to create.
Frans Lanting - 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. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, he earned a master’s degree in economics then moved to the United States to study environmental planning. Soon after, he began photographing the natural world–and never turned back.
For three decades he has documented wildlife from the Amazon to Antarctica to promote understanding about the Earth and its natural history through images that convey a passion for nature and a sense of wonder about our living planet.
“Frans Lanting has set the standards for a whole generation of wildlife photographers,’’ according to the BBC. “Mr. Lanting’s photographs take creatures that have become ordinary and transform them into haunting new visions,” writes field biologist Dr. George Schaller in The New York Times. “As a chronicler of natural history today, Frans Lanting is a singular, extraordinary talent,” says Thomas Kennedy, former Director of Photography at National Geographic. “He has the mind of a scientist, the heart of a hunter, and the eyes of a poet.”
Lanting’s work is commissioned frequently by National Geographic, where he served as a Photographer-in-Residence. His assignments have ranged from a first look at the fabled bonobos of the Congo to a unique circumnavigation by sailboat of South Georgia Island in the subantarctic. In a remote part of the upper Amazon Basin, he spent weeks on platform towers to obtain rare tree-canopy views of wild macaws. He has lived for months with seabirds on isolated atolls in the Pacific Ocean, followed lions through the African night, and camped among giant tortoises inside a volcano in the Galápagos.
Lanting did pioneering work in Madagascar, where he documented wildlife and tribal traditions never photographed before. His celebrated coverage of the Okavango Delta in National Geographic has been credited with inspiring a surge of international interest in wildlife and conservation in Botswana. His photo essays about rainforest ecology in Borneo, emperor penguins in Antarctica, and the troubled fate of puffins in the North Atlantic, have been featured in publications around the world. Images from his year-long odyssey to assess global biodiversity at the turn of the millennium filled an issue of National Geographic.
Lanting’s work also includes profiles of ecological hot spots from India to New Zealand, as well as features on the majesty and plight of albatrosses, the last of the Asiatic cheetahs in Iran, and a remarkable study of chimpanzees in Senegal that is shedding new light on human evolution.
In 2006, Lanting launched The LIFE Project, a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth from the Big Bang to the present, as a book, an exhibition, an interactive website (www.LifeThroughTime.com), and a multimedia orchestral performance with music by Philip Glass. The symphonic version of LIFE premiered in Santa Cruz, California, in 2006 and has been touring North America and Europe ever since. ORIGINS, a new multimedia production based on LIFE, was performed in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2008, at the official ceremony to inaugurate CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the largest machine ever built to study the origins of the universe. LIFE was performed at the Lincoln Center in New York in 2009 to launch the World Science Festival and to honor the distinguished biologist Dr. E. O. Wilson, and in 2012 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands attended a performance of LIFE at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam during a gala event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the World Wildlife Fund.
Lanting’s books have received awards and acclaim: “No photographer turns animals into art more completely than Frans Lanting,” writes The New Yorker. His books include Okavango: Africa’s Last Eden (1993, 2012), Life: A Journey Through Time (2006), Jungles (2000), Penguin (1999), Living Planet(1999), Eye to Eye (1997), Bonobo (1997), Forgotten Edens (1993), Madagascar, A World Out of Time (1990), Islands of the West (1986), and Feathers (1982). In 2000, his book Eye to Eye was named by National Public Radio-KQED as one of the 50 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.
Lanting has received many honors for his work. 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. He has been honored as a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in London and is a recipient of Sweden’s Lennart Nilsson Award.
Lanting’s fine art prints are represented in many public and private collections, and he has had more than one hundred solo exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world. Three of his images were selected by his peers for a charity auction at Christie’s that featured the forty most important photographs of nature ever made.
Lanting’s mission is to use photography to help create leverage for conservation efforts ranging from local initiatives to global campaigns, through his publications, alliances, public appearances, and active support of environmental organizations. He serves as an Ambassador for the World Wildlife Fund Netherlands, and on the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund USA, as well as on the Leadership Council of Conservation International, and on the International Board of WildAid. Lanting is a Trustee of the Foundation Board of the University of California Santa Cruz, and is an honorary Director of the Friends of Long Marine Lab. He is a columnist for Outdoor Photographer, a co-founder of the North American Nature Photographers Association (NANPA), and a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP).
Frans Lanting makes his home in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and partner, Chris Eckstrom, an editor, videographer, and former staff writer at National Geographic with whom he collaborates on fieldwork and publishing projects.
John Shaw – The author of several best-selling nature photography how-to books he is often credited with helping beginning photographers to improve their photography and is still a leading figure in the workshop market today
John has been a professional nature photographer since the early 1970s. His work has been published in many publications and books, including National Geographic, Nature’s Best, National Wildlife, Audubon, Outdoor Photographer, and many others. In 1997 he received the first-ever Outstanding Photographer Award given by NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association). Nikon chose him as a featured Legend Behind the Lens in 2002, while Microsoft designated him an Icon of Imaging in 2006. He has been part of Epson’s Stylus Pro fine art print makers group since 2001.
John has published six books on nature photography, eight eBooks on Photoshop and Lightroom, plus two eBooks of photographs. A new work, John Shaw’s Guide to Digital Nature Photography, is scheduled for publication in early 2015. He has photographed on every continent, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Provence to Patagonia.