The Oldest Living Things in the World

The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Since 2004, I’ve travelled the world to photograph continuously living organisms 2,000 years old and older. The work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: It’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and is driven by philosophic inquiry. I begin at "year zero," and look back from there, photographing the past in the present. These remarkable organisms have survived ice ages, geologic shifts, and the spread of human beings across the planet. Until now. In the past few years alone, we’ve already lost two of our planet’s elders.

I’ve photographed 30 different representative species that have surpassed the 2,000-year mark, ranging from lichens in Greenland that grow only 1 cm every hundred years, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Brain Coral in the Caribbean, and an 80,000-year-old colony of Aspen in Utah. There are organisms that have lived 2,000 years or more on every continent. I recently returned from an expedition to Antarctica for some 5,500-year-old moss, and before that to Australia, where I photographed the Stromatolites—organisms that are tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of all life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago—as well as a 43,000-year-old clonal shrub in Tasmania that is the last of its kind left on the planet, simultaneously rendering it critically endangered and theoretically immortal

I approach my subjects as individuals of whom I’m making portraits, to put a face to a name, as it were, and facilitate an anthropomorphic connection to a deep timescale otherwise too physiologically challenging for our brain to internalize. Themes of mortality, sustainability, and the elegiac provide context in which to consider and connect to Deep Time. This, in turn, is held in tension with the shallow time inherent to the medium of photography. What does it mean to capture a multi-millennial lifespan in 1/60th of a second? Or for that matter, to be an organism in my 30s bearing witness to organisms that precede human history and will hopefully survive us well into future generations?

When we start looking at these organisms within the collective context of deep time, a bigger picture emerges, and we start to see how all of individuals have stories, and that all of those stories are in turn interconnected. This original index of millennia-old organisms has never before been compiled in the arts or the sciences; in fact, there is no formal area of study in the sciences that even considers longevity across species. I believe that it’s my job as an artist to answer some questions, but to ask many more.

Rachel Sussman's first book will be published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2014. Visit her website to view more of her work, and check out her TED Talk to learn more about the Oldest Living Things in the World.

Jomon Sugi, Japanese Cedar #0705-002 (2,180 to 7,000 years old; Yaku Shima, Japan)

Searching for Armillaria Death Rings #1106-1129 (2,400 + years old; Malheur National Forest, Oregon)

Antarctic Beech #1211-1020362 (12,000 years old; Lamington National Park, Queensland, Australia)

Charred remains of the Senator Tree, February 8, 2012. (3,500 years old; Seminole County, Florida)

Sagole Baobab #0707-00505 (2,000 years old; Limpopo Province, South Africa)

Box huckleberry #0906-0103 (13,000 years old; Perry County, Pennsylvania)