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In the year 2000, world-renowned wildlife photographer Frans Lanting set out on a personal journey to photograph the evolution of life on earth. He made pilgrimages to true time capsules like a remote lagoon in Western Australia, spent time in research collections photographing forms of microscopic life, and even found ways to create visual parallels between the growth of organs in the human body and the patterns seen on the surface of the earth. The resulting volume is a glorious picture book of planet earth depicting the amazing biodiversity that surrounds us all. Lanting’s true gift lies beyond his technical mastery: it is his eye for geometry in the beautiful chaos of nature that allows him to show us the world as it has never been seen before. From crabs to jellyfish, diatoms to vast geological formations, jungles to flowers, monkeys to human embryos, LIFE is a testament to the magical beauty of life in all its forms and is Lanting’s most remarkable achievement to date.

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. Lanting’s previous TASCHEN titles include Eye to Eye, Jungles, and Penguin.

In this deluxe commemorative edition, LIFE's editors focus on the publication's achievements more tightly than they ever have before: This is truly the best of everything LIFE has accomplished. In these pages are the ten best war photos ever taken for LIFE; the ten best photo essays ever to grace our pages (including the works of Capa and Parks and Smith); the ten loveliest pictures from Hollywood (in fact, the ten best pictures of Marilyn Monroe ever taken by such as Halsmann, Eisenstaedt and her dear friend Milton Greene), the ten best sports pictures, the ten funniest pictures we ever ran. The ten best pictures from the space race, and the ten most significant pictures to the human race, including Lennart Nilsson's "Life Before Birth."

And, here, also, are our mistakes: Ten photographs the editors never ran. The photographs (including the sailor kissing the nurse!) that everyone thinks made the cover, but didn't.

LIFE is renowned for its photography, of course, but we will excerpt, as well, great words that appeared in our pages: the ten best contributions from Ernest Hemingway, Jacqueline Kennedy, John Steinbeck, Theodore H. White, John Updike, Elmore Leonard and others.

This is a premium volume of LIFE, and beyond its 200-plus pages, which include a review of every LIFE cover ever published, there is, included here, the ultimate premium: The first-ever LIFE issue, with the Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Fort Peck Dam on the cover, reprinted in its entirety, at actual size (which was really big 10 1/2" x 14") and able to be detached.

Nothing graces a coffee table like a stunning book that reminds us visually of the glories of nature, and it is the rare nature book that is as beautiful as "The Wonders of Life." Nature has given us marvellous things - places, plants, animals - that are spectacular of awe-inspiring almost beyond belief. To see them is to be amazed, and to see them in the always stunning photography that is the hallmark of Life is to see them in an entirely new way. The editors travel the world in these pages, visiting exotic locations from the deepest Amazon jungle to the glittering Barrier Reef extending from Australia's Gold Coast.

Here we have an endless stream of exotica-exotic living things growing from the ground and exotic critters of all shapes and sizes, crawling, bounding and flying around. As LIFE's editors put it in their introduction: "This is a wild book. In its pages we have animals as big as trucks and plants as big as small towns. We have flowers that dance for our pleasure and flowers that shyly hide underground, flowers that can kill animals and flowers that can heal animals. We have a teeny tiny bird that is directly descended from T Rex and a truly enormous bird that can't fly but can run 45 miles an hour. We have a lizard king that could rip you apart and a lizard princeling that walks on water. This is a wild, wild book." It is indeed. It is a book that is focused on life at the far fringes-the biggest, toughest, gentlest, rarest and weirdest species. It ultimately creates an astonishing image of the world around us, a world more diverse and sometimes strange than even the most imaginative reader might have expected.

Accompanying the remarkable photography, which is always LIFE's hallmark, are descriptions of each subject that will fairly boggle the mind. Did you know that a carnivorous plant's trapping mechanism often doubles as its stomach, or that an elephant seal can hold its breath for up to two hours when diving in the sea? There are as many amazing facts in these pages as there are sensational pictures. And as with earlier volumes in LIFE's Classic Collection series, Wonders of Life comes with a bonus feature: Five photographic prints from the famed LIFE archive that can be extracted, framed and hung on your wall. When the print is removed, the exact picture is still there on the page beneath, so your deluxe coffee-table book remains intact. It is, as the editors write, "an elegant trick worthy of the dancing flower, and one that our readers have come to expect-and greatly enjoy." Travel along then, around the globe and to the depths of the oceans, as LIFE celebrates the wonders of life-each of them wondrous almost beyond belief.

"Life" has, of course, visited its archives before - but never like this. This edition puts the photographs on display, not only as part of the page layout but as the page itself. The explanatory text will be out of the way so that each image can be savoured. Moreover, prints will be included that are not just suitable for framing but meant for framing. And not only will there be photographic prints; there will also be 75 other famous pictures that appeared in "Life"'s pages, the story behind each of them and the narrative history of what "Life"'s photography has long meant to the country and, indeed, to the world.

This is a unique, ground-breaking book. It is the ultimate treatment of our photography to date in book form. As such it is ultra-commemorative and collectable. "The Classic Collection", presented in this classic way, will be a definitive "Life" Book-and a category leader.

The Rolling Stones formed precisely a half century ago (well, maybe not precisely-even Keith Richards, in his recent Number One bestselling autobiography, wasn't sure if the audition was April or May). And they are still at 'work - or, rather, at play, celebrating 50 years of phenomenal music and a journey as raucous as 'Jumpin' Jack Flash. "Life's" cameras were there early and have been there since, capturing all the ragged glory. The same editors who produced a bestselling book on the Beatles as well as individual illustrated biographies of John Lennon and, recently, George Harrison now look at the long history of the Stones: the mysterious death of Brian Jones, the essential push-pull relationship of Jagger and Richards, the '60s signpost that was Altamont, the later glam, and then the welcomed return to roots. There are funny moments (the early Stones with TV host Dean Martin, who just doesn't get it when the band first fails-and fails miserably-to "conquer America") and many thrilling moments.

Matt Albiani built his reputation shooting celebrity portraits and fashion spreads for the likes of Elle and Vanity Fair. For his first book, however, he trained his lens on a different class of beautiful people, one more rugged, less glamorous, and yet unassailably iconic: the American lifeguard. A lifeguard himself in college, Albiani returned to the beaches of the U.S. to wax visual poetic on the golden summer days of his youth. Lifeguard on Duty collects the results of his years of travel across the country, from Oahu, Hawaii to Nantucket, Massachusetts, capturing these brave men in all their strength and solitude. With expressive framing and subtle composition, Albiani creates a unique and elegant portrait of the life of a guard.

Light is the key element in photography - it both creates the image and defines the style and feel of a picture. How does light work, both inside and outside the digital camera? What do you need to know about sensitivity, colour temperature and exposure? As part of the Digital Photography Expert series by Michael Freeman, Light & Lighting explores the capabilities of digital cameras and the theory of light, and helps you to put theory into practice and to shoot like a pro. Through informative, succinct text and breathtaking images, you’ll learn how best to work with light, whether it’s the sun streaming through a window, the glow of a neon sign, or the warm and fragile light of a burning candle.

Michael Freeman is an acclaimed international photographer and writer who has published a number of titles on photography, with more than a million copies sold. He has worked on commissions for many well-known publishing clients, includingTime-Life, Reader’s Digest, Condé Nast Travelerand GEO.

Franck Bohbot s Light On New York City is a sentimental and nocturnal exploration of the city that never sleeps. 

In this photography project that began in 2013, New York City is presented in a series of haunting and cinematic images as seen in the nighttime façades and storefronts of buildings that boast neon marquees and signage, eerily preserved in all of their nostalgic and kitschy glory, to undeniably sleek and contemporary exteriors with more daring architectural design. 

This aesthetic, along with the predominant absence of people, results in a melancholic atmosphere reminiscent of Edward Hopper paintings and evocative of staged theatrical sets a merging of contemporary urban reality and a magical, sentimental artificiality. 

The photographs featured in Light On New York City convey a luminescence that celebrates modernity while longing for the past in an ironically ageless paradox.

The nude is a difficult subject to light. This book gives ideas on lighting nude and semi-nude figures, based on successful examples by established and renowned photographers. It features three-dimensional illustrations, and images from photographers working in digital. It contains pictures covering full nude and semi-nude erotica.

One of the most enduring images in art and photography, the nude continues to inspire photographers of all levels to explore the nuances of lighting. Now updated for the digital age, with more than 70 all-new images and lighting diagrams, Lighting the Nude, Revised Edition offers a behind-the-scenes look at how today’s top photographers sculpt light across the human form to create stunning, unforgettable images. Inside you’ll find:

• Lighting and posing setups for more than 140 nudes.
• A wide range of styles, from classical to fantasy, romantic to erotic.
• Camera settings, tips, and techniques straight from the photographers.
• A comlete introduction to gear, along with tips for working with models.

Through the 1950s and the early 1960s, fashion photographer Lillian Bassman worked with fashion magazines and Madison Avenue Advertising agencies to create a potent vision of women's lingerie: brassieres and bodices; corsets and girdles; camisoles and chemises; nightgowns and pajamas. Using the era's supermodels, she perfectly visualised a feminine ideal and captured women's imaginations. Fifty years later these images have lost none of their allure and the enormous cultural impact of the TV show Mad Men has given them new currency.

About the Author

Lillian Bassman, is a prominent and respected figure in the world of fashion photographers. Her signature style, once described by legendary photographer Richard Avedon as making "visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things" offers a sensuous and intimate vision of modern women.

With more than 140 of her best images reproduced in stunning tritone, including many never published before and others not seen since they appeared in the pages of the legendary Harper's Bazaar of the 1950s, Lillian Bassman: Women offers a retrospective view of an extraordinary career in photography.
At 91 and still hard at work, Bassman is a beloved figure in the pantheon of fashion photographers. Her signature style, once described by Richard Avedon as making "visible that heart-breaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things," offered a sensuous and intimate vision of modern women. Says Judith Thurman, "Bassman's women--perennially soulful,elusively chic--have the poignance of an endangered species."
Well-known art writer and journalist Deborah Solomon contributes an introduction. An illustrated chronology gives a cinematic overview of a remarkable life.

The world through Linda's eyes. A retrospective of Linda McCartney's life and photography

In 1966, during a brief stint as a receptionist for Town and Country magazine, Linda Eastman snagged a press pass to a very exclusive promotional event for the Rolling Stones aboard a yacht on the Hudson River. With her fresh, candid photographs of the band, far superior to the formal shots made by the band’s official photographer, Linda secured her name as a rock ’n’ roll photographer. Two years later, in May 1968, she entered the record books as the first female photographer to have her work featured on the cover of Rolling Stone with her portrait of Eric Clapton. She went on to capture many of rock’s most important musicians on film, including Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, The Doors, and the Grateful Dead.

In 1967, Linda went to London to document the "Swinging Sixties," where she met Paul McCartney at the Bag O’Nails club and subsequently photographed The Beatles during a launch event for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Paul and Linda fell in love, and were married on March 12, 1969. For the next three decades, until her untimely death, she devoted herself to her family, vegetarianism, animal rights, and photography.

From her early rock ’n’ roll portraits, through the final years of The Beatles, to raising four children with Paul, Linda captured her whole world on film. Her shots range from spontaneous family pictures to studio sessions with Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, as well as encounters with artists Willem de Kooning and Gilbert and George. Always unassuming and fresh, her work displays a warmth and feeling for the precise moment that captures the essence of any subject. Whether photographing her children, celebrities, animals, or a fleeting moment of everyday life, she did so without pretension or artifice.

This retrospective volume is a lasting and deeply personal testament to Linda's talent, produced in close collaboration with the McCartney family, with forewords by Paul, Stella, and Mary McCartney.

The photographer:

Linda McCartney (née Eastman) was born in New York in 1941. She took a photo course with Hazel Archer and studied art history at the University of Arizona before settling in New York City, where she began her photo career shooting rock portraits. Outside of her photography, which has been exhibited in over 50 galleries worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the International Center of Photography, New York, Linda McCartney is known for her passionate animal rights activism and her staunch vegetarianism. She wrote cookbooks and founded her own brand of frozen vegetarian meals, all the while raising a family, continuing to take photographs, and participating as a Wings band member alongside Paul McCartney. She died in 1998 at the age of 56.

The contributing authors:

Annie Leibovitz’s body of work encompasses some of the most well-known portraits of our time. Leibovitz began her career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in 1970 while she was still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1983, when she joined the staff of the revived Vanity Fair, she was established as the foremost rock music photographer and an astute documentarian of the social landscape. At Vanity Fair, and later at Vogue, her work with actors, directors, writers, musicians, athletes, and political and business figures, as well as her fashion photographs, expanded her collective portrait of contemporary life. Leibovitz has published several books and has exhibited widely. She is a Commandeur in the French government’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

Martin Harrison is a historian of art and photography and an exhibition curator who has collaborated with the likes of Linda McCartney and Peter Lindbergh on numerous projects and exhibitions. He has been working on Francis Bacon for twenty years, and most recently edited the artist’s catalogue raisonné (2016).

The editor:

Alison Castle received a BA in philosophy from Columbia University and an MA in photography and film from NYU/International Center of Photography. She is editor of photography, film, and design titles, including Some Like It Hot, The Stanley Kubrick Archives, Linda McCartney. Life in Photographs, and Marc Newson. Works.

The world through Linda's eyes. A retrospective of Linda McCartney's life and photography

In 1966, during a brief stint as a receptionist for Town and Country magazine, Linda Eastman snagged a press pass to a very exclusive promotional event for the Rolling Stones aboard a yacht on the Hudson River; her fresh, candid photographs of the band were far superior to the formal shots made by the band’s official photographer, and she was instantly on the way to making a name for herself as a top rock ’n’ roll photographer. In May 1968, with her portrait of Eric Clapton, she entered the record books as the first female photographer to have her work featured on the cover of Rolling Stone. During her tenure as the leading photographer of the late 1960s’ musical scene, she captured many of rock’s most important musicians on film, including Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, The Doors, and the Grateful Dead. In 1967, Linda went to London to document the "Swinging Sixties," where she met Paul McCartney at the Bag ’O Nails club and subsequently photographed The Beatles during a launch event for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Paul and Linda fell in love, and were married on March 12, 1969. For the next three decades, until her untimely death, she devoted herself to her family, vegetarianism, animal rights, and photography.

From her early rock ’n’ roll portraits, through the final years of The Beatles, via touring with Wings to raising four children with Paul, Linda captured her whole world on film. Her shots range from spontaneous family pictures to studio sessions with Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, as well as artists Willem de Kooning and Gilbert and George. Always unassuming and fresh, her work displays a warmth and feeling for the precise moment that captures the essence of any subject. Whether photographing her children, celebrities, animals, or a fleeting moment of everyday life, she did so without pretension or artifice.

This retrospective volume - selected from her archive of over 200,000 images - is produced in close collaboration with Paul McCartney and their children. Included are forewords by Paul, Stella, and Mary McCartney. As such, it is a moving personal journal and a lasting testament to Linda’s talent.

Trade edition.

Exhibitions featuring highlights
from the Linda McCartney Archive

June 2 – July 29, 2011
The Bonni Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor, New York, NY 10022

June 7 – 16, 2011
Phillips de Pury & Company
Howick Place, London, SW1P 1BB

The photographer:

Linda McCartney (née Eastman) was born in New York in 1941. She took a photo course with Hazel Archer and studied art history at the University of Arizona before settling in New York City, where she began her photo career shooting rock portraits. Outside of her photography, which has been exhibited in over 50 galleries worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York, and the International Center of Photography, New York, Linda McCartney is known for her passionate animal rights activism and her staunch vegetarianism. She wrote cookbooks and founded her own brand of frozen vegetarian meals, all the while raising a family, continuing to take photographs, and participating as a Wings band member alongside Paul McCartney. She died in 1998 at the age of 56.

The contributing authors:

Annie Leibovitz has been a working photographer for 40 years. She was the chief photographer for Rolling Stone and then the first contributing photographer for the revived Vanity Fair. In addition to her editorial work at Vanity Fair, and later at Vogue, she has created several award-winning advertising campaigns. She has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Martin Harrison is a historian of art and photography and an exhibition curator. He worked with Linda McCartney on Roadworks (1996), Light from Within (2001), and her exhibitions at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford and the International Center of Photography in New York. He has published widely on photography and, most recently, on the paintings of Francis Bacon.

The editor:

Alison Castle received a BA in philosophy from Columbia University and an MA in photography and film from New York University (NYU/International Center of Photography masters program). She is the editor of titles on photography, film, and design, including Some Like it Hot, The Stanley Kubrick Archives, and Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs.

Peter Lindbergh is courted by international fashion magazines and is loved for his sensitive portraits of the most beautiful women in the world.

The renowned photographer who lives in Paris and New York and works all over the world has also published two earlier books with overwhelming success: Ten Women (1996) with dream shots of ten dream models, and Images of Women (1997), a collection of famous fashion photographs of beautiful women.

As a climax in his third book, Untitled 116, Peter Lindbergh presents a collection of his most impressive photographs of 116 stars in the world of pop music, cinema and fashion, such as Monica Bellucci, Juliette Binoche, Naomi Campbell, Geraldine Chaplin, Catherine Deneuve, Linda Evangelista, Aretha Franklin, Daryl Hannah, Milla Jovovich, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Demi Moore, Jeanne Moreau, Charlotte Rampling, Anna Nicole Smith, Sharon Stone, Tina Turner, Isabella Rossellini, Veruschka, and many others.