Oldest Living Things in World
"The Oldest Living Things in the World" is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world from Antarctica to the Mojave Desert in order to photograph continuously living organisms that are at least 2,000 years old. The result is a stunning and unique visual collection of species unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before. Sussman's work is both timeless and timely, and the book spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. Underlying the work is an innate environmentalism driven by Sussman's relentless curiosity. She begins at "year zero", and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. The ancient subjects live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter per century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, and an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. She journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, which are organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that's the last of its kind. These portraits reveal the living history of our planet – and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world's most extreme environments, yet climate change and human interaction have put many of the species presented here in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths. Alongside the photographs, Sussman combines tales of her global adventures tracking down these subjects with insight from the scientists who are studying them and their environments. The result is an original index of millennia-old organisms that provides a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future.
About the Author
Rachel Sussman is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn. Her photographs and writing have been featured in such places as the "New York Times", "Wall Street Journal", "Guardian", and "NPR's Picture Show". A trained member of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, Sussman has spoken on her work at TED and the Long Now Foundation. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe.
Reviews
"Something astounding happens when Rachel Sussman photographs the most ancient organisms to be found across our planet. A fraction of a second of time in her photographic exposures animates forms that have evolved across nature's deep time to create a profound experience of being alive. Sussman's ten-year investigation of the symbols of the earth's ecology is rigorous and exploratory, realized with such generosity to the reader and her ambitions make an impossibly vast subject both felt and understood" – Charlotte Cotton, author of "The Photograph as Contemporary Art"
"'The Oldest Living Things' in the World serves us the humbling profundity and pathos of things that live almost forever. We see our abstract selves and feel the terrible bludgeon of that which we cannot have and are fated only to behold. Rachel Sussman brings you to the place where science, beauty, and eternity meet" – Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine
"'The Oldest Living Things' in the World adds in dramatic manner a fascinating new perspective – literally, dinosaurs – of the living world around us" – Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University
"Contemplate life through the time scale of 'The Oldest Living Things', and you'll find your mind expanded and heart inspired. I'm thrilled to see Rachel's powerful TED talk develop and deepen into this captivating book" – Chris Anderson, TED curator
"Longevity means continuity. Long-lived people connect generations for us. Really long-lived organisms, like the ones Sussman has magnificently collected photographically, connect millennia. They put all of human history in living context. And as Sussman shows, they are everywhere on Earth. This book embodies the Long Now and the Big Here" – Stewart Brand, co-founder, The Long Now Foundation
"I am in awe – awe staring at my planet's old sages, who know the way things were, will be, and should be – awe when I appreciate Rachel Sussman's epic quest to round them all up and her daring in stealing their soul with her photographs" – Paola Antonelli, senior curator, Museum of Modern Art
