Capturing the oldest life-forms on Earth: inside Frans Lanting's Life exhibition

Uniting art and science, the award-winning Dutch photographer's project has led him all over the world, from ice formations in Greenland to Shark Bay in Australia

Life started with the humble horseshoe crab. Not life itself, but Life: A Journey Through Time, nature photographer Frans Lanting's multi-year experiment travelling the globe, searching for places and specimens as old as the planet itself. The idea came to him when he was on assignment photographing the horseshoe crabs that gather every spring in a place as prosaic as the New Jersey shore. He realised the scene must have looked much the same aeons ago.

Lanting's big bang came in 2006 with a book, a documentary, a TED Talk and a Philip Glass symphony all dedicated to the ever-changing peripatetic photo show. Now the project has culminated with an exhibition at Los Angeles's Annenberg Space for Photography, with added video elements and regular screenings of the documentary, which features interviews with biologists including Harvard professor Andrew Knoll.