For nearly a decade, Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and Guggenheim Fellow Rachel Sussman has been travelling the globe to discover and document the oldest organisms — living things over 2,000 years of age. Her breathtaking photographs and illuminating essays are now collected in The Oldest Living Things in the World (2014), a book spanning seven continents that examines issues of deep time, permanence and impermanence, and the interconnectedness of life.
From the Preface:
What does it mean when the organic goes head-to-head with the geologic? We start talking about deep time and the quotidian in the same breath, along with all the strata in between. All of these organisms are living palimpsests: they contain myriad layers of their own histories within themselves, along with records of natural and human events; new chapters written over the old, year after year, millennium after millennium. When we look at them in the frame of deep time, a bigger picture emerges, and we start to see how all of the individuals have stories, and that all of those stories are in turn interconnected — and in turn, inextricably connected to us all.
~ Rachel Sussman
Photo Gallery
Llareta | 3,000 years | Atacama Desert, ChilePando (quick aspen) | 80,000 years | Fish Lake, Utah, USAAlerce (Patagonian cypress) | 2,200 years | Patagonia, ChileDead Huon pine | 10,500 years | Mount Read, Tasmania; Royal Tasmanian Botanical Garden, HobartBristlecone pine | 5,068 years | White Mountains, California, USDetails of Bristlecone pine| 5,068 years | White Mountains, California, USBrain coral | 2,000 years | Speyside, TobagoBaobab | 2,000 years | Limpopo, South AfricaWelwitschia Mirabilis | 2,000 years| Namib-Naukluft Desert, NamibiaSoil sample containing Siberian actinobacteria | 400,000-600,000 years | Kolyma Lowlands, SiberiaLower slope leading to Palmer’s Oak | 13,000 years | Riverside, California, USABox Huckleberry (Bibleberry) branches stripped by deer | 8,000 to 13,000 years | Perry County, Pennsylvania, USAStromatolites | 2,000-3,000 years | Carbla Station, Western AustraliaAntarctic moss | 5,500 years | Elephant Island, South GeorgiaSpruce Picca |9,500 years | SwedenJomon Sugi, Japanese Cedar |2,100 – 7,000 years |, Yoko Shima, JapanMap lichen | 3,000 years | GreenlandAntarctic Beech | 6,000 years |, Lamington National Park, AustraliaRare eucalyptus | 13,000 years |, New South Wales, AustraliaPalmer’s oak | 13,000 years |, Riverside, California
