Welwitschia 22411

Beginning in 2004, Rachel Sussman worked with biologists and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms 2,000 years old and older to create a body of work entitled "The Oldest Living Things in the World." Sussman creates these portraits in order to facilitate an anthropomorphic connection to a deep timescale otherwise too physiologically challenging for our brain to internalize. Sussman's images force us to confront the possibility that organisms whose genesis predates human history may not survive the impact of human activities on the climate and their habitat.