When photographer Frans Lanting decided he wanted to do a project on life "from its earliest beginnings to its present diversity," he faced a problem: How do you photograph things and events that existed millions, if not billions, of years ago?
With some imaginative thinking, the patterns radiating out in a cross-section of fossilized wood stood in for the Big Bang. Volcanoes and geysers evoked the Earth's fiery beginnings. Present-day creatures like the frigatebird and the tuatara (a reptile found only in New Zealand) exhibited traits of their ancient relations.
All these images, and many others, found their way into Lanting's latest book, Life: A Journey Through Time. Listening to him describe the evolutionary stages that each photograph represents at a talk last weekend (a chronology well-depicted on his website) left me as enamored of the science behind the images as the artistry in them.
When photographer Frans Lanting decided he wanted to do a project on life "from its earliest beginnings to its present diversity," he faced a problem: How do you photograph things and events that existed millions, if not billions, of years ago?
All these images, and many others, found their way into Lanting's latest book, Life: A Journey Through Time. Listening to him describe the evolutionary stages that each photograph represents at a talk last weekend (a chronology well-depicted on his website) left me as enamored of the science behind the images as the artistry in them.