- [frans] it's only a generation ago that we were able to project ourselves off our planet and look back at the earth as a whole. (cinematic music) this is the most meaningful, the most important photograph ever made. it changed, fundamentally, the way everybody considers the totality of life, the interconnectedness of everything that is alive on this planet. and that realization goes to the heart of the life project.

(upbeat music) i wanted to tell the story of the evolution of life on earth. i wanted to let people experience the beauty and the wonder of all these different life forms. i wanted to take people on this journey from the big bang to the present, to become a time traveler with a camera. (gentle music) frans lanting is one of the great nature photographers in the world. think of some of the most exciting pictures you've ever seen in "national geographic", and you can see how frans is able to evoke that sense of wonder and majesty that comes out of life itself.

- he's able to focus, not only on one particular creature, but also specific interactions with their own species or other species, and you get those moments of drama. - frans is a premiere figure in photography and in conservation. his work on madagascar really catalyzed action on behalf of that incredibly important country. he's also done the same for botswana or namibia, for south africa, for many other parts of the world. - i picked up a camera for the first time when i came to the united states as a student in the early 70s. i was intrigued by the american west, and i was astonished by it. wilderness is an american notion. it really opened my eyes to a different connection with nature than what i'd grown up with in the netherlands.

at the same time, the great conservationists, like john muir, and photographers like ansel adams began to inspire me. and i plunged into photography. at the time, i had no clue about photographic technique. i was really just looking through the camera, and then iiked somhing. i would press the shutter. but then, gradually, i began to look at the natural world very differently. there are animals out there with their own stories, with their own lives. and if you pay attention, you can become one with them. i like the blacks in here, but... - yeah, you don't see... - chris eckstrom is my wife. she's my partner. - we met at the "national geographic". frans was a freelance photographer, and i was a writer. and we've been pretty much together ever since. i cover the behind-the-scenes side of our assignment work, producing stories about our work in the field. - i started off photographing animals one at a time, focusing on the charismatic mammals and the big birds, working with nature in a very intimate way.

but i also began to work with scientists, and they taught me a lot about the way the natural world works. - this used to be an old sea floor. - and as their ideas began to evolve, so did my vision of what i should photograph. (whimsical music) i was on the shores of delaware bay one evening, photographing horseshoe crabs for "national geographic". and thousands of them are coming out of the water, which they do every spring when they spawn at the tide line. and as modern new jersey was fading away in twilight, i felt like i was transported back in time as the only observer in a world that was truly prehistoric because these crabs had been around for 400,000,000 years. and i just had this epiphany that i could see the past and the present. i could tell the story of life on earth

and let people experience the wonder of life from the very beginning to the present, and that led me on this fascinating journey through time. - when i first heard about frans' life project, i thought, 'only frans would take on a project of that ambition and that magnitude, tackling the life of the earth from pre-history until the present.' but he's probably one of the few who could really pull it off because that's so much of what his life has been dedicated to already. - over the course of the six or seven years that we traveled to produce the life project, we traveled all over central and south america, panama, costa rica, peru, botswana, kenya, and tanzania to work in serengeti plains and down in the okavango delta. - for the life project, i set myself a challenge which was to make images that could serve as stepping stones on a journey through time. and by talking with biologists and geologists, i began to get a sense of where i could go and

what i could photograph. the story of life starts in space. our energy becomes matter, turning into shapes over time. that takes us from the big bang to four and a half billion years ago when the earth was solidified before there was any life, and we'd show the interactions between the five classic elements that greek philosophers originally recognized, fire, earth, water, air, and space. we worked around live volcanoes 'cause that's where life may have begun. and, certainly, they're symbolic for the way the earth began. - we traveled to the big island of hawaii and flew a helicopter over the kilauea volcano, and it started to erupt. so we were able to get out there with geologists

on the slope of the erupting volcano and document it. - the lava is overflowing out on that side, and the whole rim is cracking here. (dramatic music) the air is quite poisonous. it's full of sulfur, a scary experience to be there and awesome at the same time. it gives you an idea of the way things were before we had a healthy atmosphere where you could breathe oxygen. (swelling music) the foundations for life planet rth are all e little things, including the ones that we can't even see with our naked eyes. - the history of life on earth is really the story of microorganisms. if you look at the entire history of life,

which lasts on the order of four billion years, the first three and a third billion of that is a microbial world. - the geologic record of earth goes back to about 3.8 billion years. and in some of the oldest intact rocks, you already see evidence of life. - there's a wonderful place called shark bay in western australia where you still have microbial communities that build structures called stromatolites. - a stromatolite is a sedimentary structure that formed where microbial organisms were living at the sea floor. layer by layer, the sediment would deposit. and microbes trapped the grains of sediment. dome-shaped structures would form and be preserved like a fossil in the geologic record. you could look at this and think of this as being like the tombstones of your earliest ancestors. - [frans] those bacteria themselves started exhaling oxygen. they changed the atmosphere, which is the reason the sky is blue today.

and what we're breathing every single moment of our lives was created billions of years ago by those bacteria. - life certainly can change the atmosphere of the planet, and it's certainly affected by the atmosphere of the planet. one way to look at life is life is something that takes those resources, adds energy, and changes its name to something else that it can use. (somber music) - there are many different types of environments. and, not surprisingly, biology and environmental change are very closely intertwined. the environment changes in one direction. life will respond to those changes, and that leads up to and culminates in the diversification of animals in the oceans where you see this great arc of evolution and environmental change.

- in the living world, evolution is absolutely necessary. a constant change is a requirement in the genetics of a species, and the reason is very simple, because the living world consists, substantially, of an arms race between predators and prey, between parasites and their hosts. and all of that is in constant flux. mind you, it's very slow by human standards. - the story of life is one of constant innovation, but i didn't wanna write a textbook about the history of life. chris and i are storytellers. and by adopting a set of characters, we were able to take people into very complex situations and simplify them. one of our characters was the horseshoe crab who became symbolic for innovations that happened billions

of years ago in a course of the evolution of life on earth. - with the environment changing the way it has for 450,000,000 years, horseshoe crabs figured out a plan that allows them to harmonize with the environment and continue to survive. we've had many great extinctions, but the horseshoe crabs are still here. - horseshoe crabs are symbols of how life managed to establish a toehold on dry land, and that was a pivotal step forward in evolution. animals were able to slither out of the water, spend some time on land. but when it became time to reproduce, they had to go back into the wet because life reproduced itself in water. our frogs and our salamanders still do that today, but then life is able to free itself from that dependence on water for reproduction. and that was the next stage in the evolution of life that reptiles came up with. of course, it's not just the animals.

it's also the plants, and that was so interesting. i never considered the mosses and the ferns as important as the big, charismatic animals. so my orientation changed. - frans took the geological and biological story very seriously. he then interprets it through his own medium in his own way, but every image that i see, i understand what the scientific motivation was. (whimsical music) - the challenge that most natural history photographers have faced with is to separate the natural world from all these entanglements with human society because we are everywhere on the planet. but for the life project, i set myself a new challenge, to make every image appear as if i were there at the moment

when those life forms first came into being. so that meant, in the case of this very primitive reptile known as a tuatara, which evolved more than 200,000,000 years ago and predated all the dinosaurs, i could not show anything that evolved later than that. the gilapagos islands is a place where you get an idea of what the world may have been like before there were mammals around 'cause there are no native mammals in the galapagos islands, and these giant tortoises are a perfect model for giant dinosaurs. also, by applying a photographic technique and a perspective, i can make iguanas look like dinosaurs. - when i was a little kid, dinosaurs were plodding, dumb animals that existed a long time ago. and now we're getting more and more of a feel how dynamic they were and how they gave rise to the birds.

- life gains new mobility. flamingos cover continents, and true migrations get underway. birds witness the emergence of flowering plants, and that was a true innovation, how life managed to use air as a way to disperse seeds. and that's when life gets lush. true jungles arise, and that sparks new layers of interdependence. and co-evolution begins to entwine plants with insects and birds with plants. 65,000,000 years ago, when that big asteroid hit the earth and all of the dinosaurs were wiped out, that gave mammals a chance to begin to flourish.

tree shrews are symbolic for the very first mammals. they're frenzied little animals. think of squirrels on steroids, here now, over there the next second. when you work with animals, you have to be totally alert all the time, use all your senses, and leave everything else behind and become one with nature. - with wildlife photography, the absolute most important thing is that there's a real sense of integrity that people will know that you're not manipulating the situation or creating the situation, that you're actually just recording a real moment. - impalas, they're always on edge. they're always nervous, and you can see that in their body language. their ears are up, and they're ready to bolt away 'cause they never know where danger might come from. - primates are particularly appealing to us because they're of the order of mammals

that we are a part of. the great apes and also the baboons follow patterns very similar to what early humans followed. - we project so much into animals. they're really our mirrors into our own souls, our fears, our desires, our aspirations. and i can capture some of these things in images that make a portrait of an animal, ultimately, as unique as a portrait of a human being. - animals of any type have only characterized the last 15% of our planet's history. human history is an almost unimaginably short percentage of the whole history of life. we're really newcomers. - elephants witnessed the emergence of human beings in africa. and for millions of years, we co-existed with them. and they co-existed with us. - the reason we called this project life instead of nature is because we wanted people to appreciate humans

as part of life. - humans evolved like everything else on the planet, but i didn't wanna photograph ourselves as recognizable human beings. so i photographed embryos in medical collections. i photographed cross sections through a human hand that would show the way blood distributes itself through human tissue as the same universal pattern i see rivers on the surface of the earth. the essence in photography is to abstract. - when you start to see the visual examples of the earth evolving, you begin to get a sense of how truly wondrous it was. - now, after billions of years of evolution, we have arrived in the present. and we're back to looking at nature as this tapestry with ancient things co-existing with recent things,

the totality of life. - no organism exists on its own. all organisms are a part of interacting communities, and we are all reliant on materials that other organisms make. the reason you take vitamins in the morning is that you need them to live, but you can't manufacture them. - life itself is an element that helps support the continued existence of all life on earth. - i think we're on our way to a deeper understanding of the diversity of life on the planet. biodiversity is a way to look at nature as a network between untold different species. - if you look at what we have discovered thus far, everything, plants, animals, microorganisms, we're at about 1.8 to 1.9 million species. current estimates of total diversity are about 10,000,000,

so we only know maybe 20% of the species that exist out there. - which means that we are, in fact, living on a little known planet. and 8,000,000 unknown are a key part of what's keeping us alive. - so conservation of the natural world is in our own best interest. - we're all becoming aware just how interdependent life is. in a fundamental sense, genetically, we are all related. and that has now been confirmed by science. the dna that is within us is not that different from the dna that exists in other animals and plants. for me, photography, originally, was a way to escape into nature. bring that strobe on the ferns out a little further.

- okay, try that. - okay. but as i became more and more aware of pressing of our mental issues, i realized that i might actually be able to make a difference. there's something in pictures that reaches us. people will look and try to find out what's behind a picture. and that connection between the surface and what is within, that is the magic in photography. okay, guys, that's the one! we've got it! - the story that science has given us about an evolutionary history that arcs over four billion years and includes bacteria, trilobites, dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, that's an extraordinary story. it's absolutely fascinating to see someone tell that story in a very different way. - the life project is really about how this amazing web of life has arisen and creates the conditions to support life on earth.

- gorgeous. before there was life, earth was a naked piece of rock. and now life is everywhere, and it really stretches around the planet like a skin. i wanted to show people the past and the present as a different way to experience nature, but what's perhaps more important even than that is to celebrate the unity and the kinship with all life because the realization that we are all related is truly profound. and that's an awesome realization as we are hurtling through space on this tiny living planet. (gentle music)

(serene music)

announcer: funding for the kcet "fine cut festival of films" is generously provided by the bridges larson foundation and by the national endowment for the arts, on the web at arts.gov.