Anne Menke, the world traveling, world renown, high energy, super smart, super funny, super friendly and super talented fashion photographer has released (finally) a book of her globe trotting photographs.

See The World Beautiful reflects just twelve years of Menke’s relentless traveling under the guise of “Fashion Photographer” I say “guise” partly in jest because clearly, Menke made these trips happen, either by somehow convincing her magazine editors that dragging a crew across the Mongolian plains was absolutely the only way to make that story work … or because, having pulled it off over and over again from the slopes of the Andes to horse farms on the Argentinean high desert, they started to convince themselves that their stories needed her in order to work!

What we get here, however, is not page after page of beautiful models modeling beautiful clothing, rather in this 11 x 14 hard bound book, Menke flips her camera around and reveals what must have been her ulterior motive all along: to see the whole Beautiful World!

Organized by date and longitude & latitude coordinates, the stories compiled here display not only Menke’s passion for photography but also her uniquely energetic lust for life.

LTI/Lightside prepped the files for See The World Beautiful from Menke’s original negatives. Some of us have been working with Anne for longer than the twelve years represented in the book, so having the chance to comb through the archived material and image it digitally for the first time felt a lot like seeing old friends again.

We also produced a selection of images from See The World Beautiful for an exhibition and book launch event at Clic Studios here in New York City. And while it might not be totally evident from her fashion photography, Menke is a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to this sort of thing. The great majority of prints hanging were conventionally enlarged in our darkrooms despite having just created a full set of master files for the publisher!

And as you can see below, Anne certainly knows how to pack a room … which insured the event was a great success!

Tags: Anne Menke, Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), B+W Silver Gelatin Printing, Conventional C-Printing, Digital-C Printing, Exhibitions, Retouching, Scanning