Human: A Portrait of Our World begins with an unusually broad documentary undertaking. Over three years, Yann Arthus-Bertrand and the GoodPlanet Foundation gathered more than 2,000 interviews across 70 countries while making portraits and aerial photographs. Rather than proposing a single account of humanity, the book organizes this material around fundamental concerns—including justice, tolerance, poverty, war, and happiness—allowing individual experience to address questions shared across borders.

Photography is only one register of the project. Interview excerpts bring the voices of participants onto the page, while essays by journalists and human-rights activists establish wider social and political contexts. The combination of close portraiture and views from the air also creates a productive change of scale: people appear as distinct speakers and subjects, but also as inhabitants of landscapes shaped by collective histories and environmental conditions.

The publication was conceived alongside a film by Arthus-Bertrand and the GoodPlanet Foundation, intended for free worldwide distribution and international public screenings. That relationship matters to the book’s character. It belongs to a cross-media documentary project in which still images, testimony, moving image, and civic discussion operate together, while the printed volume gives the photographs and words a form that can be revisited at an individual pace.

Published by Abrams in 2015, this 224-page paperback records an ambitious attempt to portray humanity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For a serious photobook collection, its significance lies not in exclusivity but in its hybrid method: portrait photography and aerial imagery are set in dialogue with oral history, essays, and social advocacy. It merits attention as an example of how a large-scale photographic survey can move between personal witness and global perspective without reducing its subject to images alone.