Herbert Lang was born in Germany in 1879, emigrated to the United States in 1903 and joined the staff of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in the same year. In 1906 he represented the Museum on a big-game collecting expedition to Kenya and brought back hundreds of specimens of mammals and birds. He was chosen to lead the Museum's expedition to the Congo in 1909, the first major scientific trip into the Congo Basin and was accompanied by James Chapin, a junior year biology student of Columbia University. The planned two-year expedition lasted five and a half with, again, hundreds of specimens, photographs and watercolours being brought back for the Museum. On his return, Lang prepared, catalogued and preserved the specimens. In 1925 he returned, this time to Angola (then Portuguese West Africa), on another collecting expedition and remained in Africa working at the Transvaal Museum, South Africa, continuing his association with AMNH carrying out several joint projects. Marrying in 1935, Lang took over management of his wife's hotel in Pretoria before finally retiring to a nearby farmhouse where he died in 1957. Lang's reputation was as much for his excellent wildlife and ethnographic photography as his scientific work and he said that he preferred to shoot with his camera rather than his gun.