Exercise 7, page 109.0:01
To the ends of the earth, France Lanting travels to the ends of the earth, and everyone who sees his pictures wants to follow him.0:13
James Owen talks to the world's greatest travel and wildlife photographer.0:37
It can be tough at the top, especially if you are Franz Lanting, the world's leading travel and wildlife photographer.0:44
Naturally, you want to get pictures of something rarely seen, such as the annual gathering of hundreds of rare macaws deep in the forests of the Amazon basin.0:53
So what do you have to do?1:04
Well, you haul a canoe, supplies, camera gear, and a steel scaffold weighing more than a ton up the Andes.1:07
Then you paddle miles upriver before erecting a tower that gets you to the tree canopy where the birds you want to photograph live.1:16
For the next month, you spend 12 hours a day in a space the size of an office desk.1:26
It is intensely humid, and sweat bees drink from your skin, making it difficult to focus a lens without being stung.1:33
Things are no easier on the jungle floor.1:43
Fungus sprouts on your equipment, and there are leaf cutter ants which eat through your tent overnight.1:46
And despite all this, you still get the perfect shot.1:53
His photographs are unlike any others and include shots of serpentine jungle rivers, chameleons caught asleep, a seed falling to earth, and almost the last white rhinoceros.1:58
Many of Lanting's images are taken as close ups and are in fact attempts to portray animals as individuals, as distinct in their characters as you and I. Other effects of this approach to photography have almost been as impressive2:13
as the pictures themselves.2:31
His essay in 1987 on the landscape and People of Madagascar helped to stimulate awareness of the country's extraordinarily diverse wildlife.2:34
This then prompted a growth in tourism and foreign aid, which has enabled the government to substantially increase its annual conservation budget.2:45
Lunting has such a professional attitude that it comes as a surprise to learn that he did not pick up a camera until he was in his early 20s.2:55
Bored with his job as an environmental planner, he taught himself photography and in the early 1980s moved to the US I never envisaged that I could make a career out of it, he says, but we've witnessed a tremendous3:06
increase in concern for the natural world.3:21
Photography plays a significant role in shaping those perceptions.3:25
So Lenting has traveled all over the world in pursuit of quarry such as the last white rhinoceros in Zaire, in the hope that his photographs can play a part in increasing awareness of the worrying rate of extinction of3:29
People are also important to Lanting's work and he never takes on a project without involving those on the spot, from Bushmen to Native Americans.3:46
It is perhaps this that distinguishes his photographs from our holiday snapshots.3:57
I think a photograph of whatever it might be, a landscape, a person, requires personal involvement.4:03
That means knowing your subject and not just snapping what's in front of you.4:10
And with that, he rises quickly from his chair and heads for the great outdoors, bound for an encounter with the local wildlife, taxi drivers and London pigeons.4:14
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