This article was taken from the December issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Rachel Sussman has used the web to fund a portfolio of the Earth's oldest living things
In a biology lab in the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, in August 2007, Brooklyn-based artist Rachel Sussman was taking photos of a slide of soil. Her quest was -- and still is -- to photograph the oldest living things in the world, and she had a winner. The soil sample contained
actinobacteria drilled from the Siberian permafrost.
Its age: 400,000 to 600,000 years. "That's also the smallest thing I've photographed so far," she says.
When it comes to long life, there seems to be no magic formula.
One trick, says Sussman, 35, is to take it slow, "not fast and flashy...and live in environments where most other life wouldn't survive, let alone thrive."
For each portrait, Sussman works closely with researchers in the field. The people with whom she collaborated on the
actinobacteria were then on the verge of proving conclusively that it had been growing for the last half-million years. She has also introduced scientists working in similar fields to one another. "Specialisation is necessary," she says, "but sometimes you can miss the forest for the trees." Her latest expedition, funded via Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, is to photograph 100,000-year-old seagrass that lives between Formentera and Ibiza. With 22 species photographed, ten remain on her list, but the project (minimum age to enter: 2,000 years) will never be complete.
LLARETA
3,000 years old
Atacama, Chile
It looks like a soft moss (above), but Llareta is a shrub of densely packed branches and clustered leaves ("like topiary on steroids"), related to parsley. "It's so hard you can stand on it."
SPRUCE GRAN PICEA
9,550 years old
Fulufjället, Sweden
The spindly, tall growth is 40 years old: the bush below is far older.
BRAIN CORAL
2,000 years old
Speyside, Tobago
Sussman learned how to shoot underwater to capture the coral, which is 5.5m across. "It was like a moon."
<a href="http://rachelsussman.com/" target="_blank">http://rachelsussman.com</a>
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
