Join husband-and-wife team Frans Lanting and Christine Eckstrom on a wild desert journey through Namibia—a land of exotic creatures and haunting landscapes.
Bio
Christine Eckstrom
CHRIS ECKSTROM is a writer, editor, and videographer whose
work celebrates the wonder of the natural world and seeks to explore how
people and wildlife can coexist. 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
(National Geographic Books), and is a contributing author of more than a
dozen books published by National Geographic, where she worked as a
staff writer for 15 years. Assignments have taken her to wild places on
all seven continents to cover subjects ranging from wildlife in Zambia
to a profile of Brazil’s Pantanal.
For the past two decades she has worked with her
husband and partner, Frans Lanting, on field assignments from the Amazon
to Mongolia. Her stories have appeared in National Geographic, Audubon, International Wildlife, National Geographic Traveler, and in other international publications. Her National Geographic Traveler story, “The Last Real Africa,” earned her a Lowell Thomas Award for Best Magazine Article on Foreign Travel.
Eckstrom collaborated with Lanting to produce Life: A Journey Through Time
(Taschen), a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth
from the Big Bang to the present. They worked together to realize The
LIFE Project as a traveling exhibition, an interactive website (www.LifeThroughTime.com), and a multimedia orchestral performance featuring the imagery of Lanting and the music of composer Philip Glass. LIFE
as a multimedia production premiered at the Cabrillo Festival of
Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, in 2006, and is currently
touring North America and Europe. Eckstrom and Lanting also worked
together to produce ORIGINS, a new multimedia production based on LIFE. Specially commissioned by CERN, the European Council on Nuclear Research, ORIGINS was performed at the ceremony to inaugurate the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, in October 2008.
Eckstrom has teamed up with Lanting to produce a number of acclaimed natural history and photography books, including Jungles (Taschen), Penguin (Taschen), Eye to Eye (Taschen) and Okavango: Africa's Last Eden
(Chronicle Books). After traveling by icebreaker to visit emperor
penguin colonies along the coast of east Antarctica, she wrote “Time on
Ice,” a story that appeared in a collection of essays entitled Celebration of the Seas.
As a videographer, Eckstrom documents the fieldwork she
produces with Lanting. She has filmed pieces for the National
Geographic Channel and NGM.com on cloud goats in India, elephants of the
Western Ghats, Hawaii's volcanoes, wildlife in Zambia, albatrosses in
the Southern Ocean, and chimpanzees in West Africa. Her coverage of
chimpanzees in West Africa was also featured in the NOVA-National
Geographic television special "Ape Genius," which received a Peabody
Award.
Chris Eckstrom lives in Santa Cruz, California, with
her husband and partner, Frans Lanting, in a coastal meadow they share
with bobcats, coyotes, and elusive mountain lions.
Frans Lanting
One of the most widely published photographers in his field, Lanting has contributed thousands of pictures to Natural History, Audubon, LIFE, the Italian nature magazine Airone, the German magazine Stern, and many other prestigious periodicals. On commissions from National Geographic,
he has tackled difficult assignments in Antarctica, Madagascar,
Botswana, and the rainforests of Borneo, Belize, Peru, and the Congo
Basin, producing work of such outstanding quality that Wilbur Garrett,
who served as the editor of National Geographic during the 1980s,
came to regard him as "the finest nature photographer working today."
"[His] aesthetic vision and knowledge of the subject matter are unlike
those of any other natural history photographer [National Geographic]
has used," according to Thomas R. Kennedy, the magazine's director of
photography. "He's able to understand and anticipate animal behavior
with the same kind of alacrity that a photojournalist would who is
making pictures of people. The animals are unconscious of his presence,
and as a result he can get closer." Lanting's photos illustrate ten
books, four of which--Madagascar: A World Out of Time (1990), Peace on Earth (1993), Okavango: Africa's Last Eden (1993), and Forgotten Edens: Exploring the World's Wild Places
(1993)--he wrote or co-wrote. Many of the seventy-five thousand images
in his collection of color transparencies have appeared in other books
as well, and also in advertisements, filmstrips, greeting cards,
posters, and annual reports, among other vehicles. Lanting was named BBC
Photographer of the Year in 1991.
Frans Lanting was born on July 13, 1951 in Rotterdam, the
Netherlands. As a child he identified closely with the hero of two
children's books by the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlof, a boy named Nils
Holgersson, who, after being shrunk by a magician to less than half his
original size, joins a flock of wild geese and becomes an accepted
member of the animal world. At one point the leader of the geese tells
him, "If you have learned anything from this journey, Nils, you might no
longer be of the opinion that man alone should rule the world. See, you
people have so much land just for yourselves, so perhaps you could
leave some marshy lakes and swamps and sea cliffs and distant forests to
us. That way, we animals can live in peace. All my life I have been
persecuted and hunted. It would be a good thing if creatures like us
could find a refuge somewhere." In 1994 Lanting told an interviewer that
Lagerlof's story "really set the stage for a lot of what [he is] doing
now." He believes that, like Nils Holgersson, he plays the role of a
"mediator" between humans and other species. "I stay with wild animals,
and then I come back to my own people to tell them about life in
nature," he has said.
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This is a great documentary, along with the accompanying Surreal World of Franz Lanting. Both beautiful and well worth watching. I only wished there was more! Loan for Bad Credit
This is a great documentary, along with the accompanying Surreal World of Franz Lanting. Both beautiful and well worth watching. I only wished there was more!
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