Jungles

Where the wild things are

From South America to Africa, up close with rainforest flora and fauna

Jungles is a personal exploration of nature in the tropics by master photographer, storyteller, and naturalist Frans Lanting. In a unique collection of images made over a period of 20 years in jungles from the lowlands of the Congo to the cloud forests of the Andes, Lanting interprets the aesthetic splendor and the remarkable natural history of the tropical rainforest—a realm of bewildering complexity where nothing is the way it first appears. "While the essence of photography is to show, jungles hide, or at best, suggest," Lanting writes. "So I opted to show impressions of jungles to evoke a sense of their kaleidoscopic nature—the glimpses of faces that melt into shadows, the bursts of color and shimmering light."

The book features four portfolios of images taken years and continents apart, and stories of field expeditions into tropical wilderness areas. "Water and Light" shows the interplay of these elements with plant and animal life, with a story about life after dark in the jungles of Central America. "Color and Camouflage" explores the need to hide and the desire to be seen, and details a journey to a remote part of the Amazon Basin to document macaws. "Anarchy and Order" features impressions of growth and movement, and leads to a trek up a mountain in Borneo. "Form and Evolution" is an ode to the wonders of natural selection, and culminates in encounters with primates in the forests of Madagascar and Africa.

In photographs ranging from spectacular gatherings of rainbow-colored macaws to the misty exhalations of a forest at dawn, Lanting evokes the lush sensuality and intricate natural order of the tropical regions that form the beating heart of life on earth.

The photographer:
Dutch-born Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. For the past two decades he has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to Antarctica. Exhibits of his photographs have been shown at major museums in Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York, Madrid, and Amsterdam.

The editor:
Christine Eckstrom is a writer and TV producer whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Audubon, and International Wildlife. Her feature story "The Last Real Africa" won a 2007 Lowell Thomas Award for Best Magazine Article on Foreign Travel from the Society of American Travel Writers. She is also the author of Forgotten Edens: Exploring the World's Wild Places (1993). She collaborates with husband Frans Lanting from their home base in California.