Science and Culture: Capturing the world’s oldest living things

Artist Rachel Sussman thought she’d have little trouble devising a list of the world’s oldest living things for a photography project. She merely needed to find the right sort of expert.

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Jomon Sugi, Japanese cedar #0704–002 (2,180–7,000 years old, Yakushima, Japan). Image courtesy of Rachel Sussman.

Sussman first met with an evolutionary biologist who gave her background information about old living things. He noted, for example, what constitutes an old organism, such as a 12,000-year-old shrub, as opposed to a primitive species, such as the coelacanth, which has an extraordinarily long evolutionary history even though the individual fish live for only a few decades. However, the biologist wasn’t her expert; he couldn’t provide a list of old trees or corals. “He was the first person to say, no, I’m not really qualified,” she recalls.

After meeting a few other scientists who said the same, Sussman realized that the scientist she needed doesn’t exist. Everyone specializes in their own taxon. Nobody works broadly on “old living things.” So Sussman devised her own criteria and then trekked to various locations to capture these living relics with a medium-format film camera. The result is The Oldest Living Things in the World, her new book of photographs and stories about 30 organisms, ranging from a 2,000-year-old brain coral in Tobago to a 5,500-year-old moss in Antarctica (1).

Sussman set a cutoff, only cataloguing organisms that were 2,000 years or older. She counted an organism that had reproduced itself only by cloning as one, single extremely old organism; for example, a grove of quaking aspen that she photographed in Utah sends up individual trunks all of the time, but the colony has existed, with one root system, for some 80,000 years.

To figure out what to pursue, Sussman searched various combinations of terms and categories on the web in creative combinations. When she found articles about old organisms, she tried to find research papers about them and then tracked down the researchers. “Instead of working with one scientist, I’m working with 30 of them,” she says. It turned out she needed many experts to realize her vision.

One of these scientists was Martin Bay Hebsgaard, a doctoral student in biology at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen at the time that Sussman was taking her photographs. She joined him on an expedition in Greenland, where Hebsgaard was helping archaeologists date their sites by measuring lichen growth. They went on long hikes looking for the largest—and therefore oldest—map lichens they could find. “Our timespan might be 100 years and we think that’s old,” Hebsgaard says. “We sometimes forget to think the tree has been there a longer time than we have.”

Sussman sees the project, which spanned 10 years, as a way to comprehend and contemplate long periods of time that extend beyond the typical human lifespan. “By looking at these organisms as individuals that have witnessed the entirety of human history and far deeper back beyond that as well, there’s this way to connect to them,” she says. To do that, Sussman intentionally tried to shoot pictures that anthropomorphized the organisms. A sinewy 2,000-year-old Welwitschia sits alone in a Namibian desert; a gnarled 3,000-year-old chestnut tree sends out tender green shoots in the spring. “I was approaching them more as portraits than as landscapes,” she says. “It really was just meant to capture the sense of what these organisms are as individuals.”

Sussman’s work is part of an exhibition called Imagining Deep Time, appearing in the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington, DC, until January 15, 2015.