NEWARK, NEW JERSY.- �Jungles: Photographs By Frans Lansing� is currently on view at The Newark Museum through May 2, 2004. The exhibit Jungles is a personal exploration of nature in the tropical rain forest 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, Frans 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 burst of color and shimmering light." 

The exhibition narrates stories of field expeditions into tropical wilderness areas exploring four themes. "Water and Light" shows the interplay of these elements with plant and animal life, and ends with a story about life after 5 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 whose forested flanks show a unique layering of life zones. "Form and Evolution" is an ode to the wonders of natural selection, and culminates in encounters with primates in the forest of Madagascar and Africa.

For the past two decades Frans Lanting has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to the Antarctica. He portrays wild creatures as ambassadors for the preservation of complete ecosystems, and his many publications on wildlife and conservation have increased worldwide awareness of endangered ecological treasures in far corners of the earth. Jungles is sponsored in part by Nikon