Interviews: Rachel Sussman Answers Your Questions

Interviews: Rachel Sussman Answers Your Questions 24

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 08, 2014 @02:48PM from the here-they-are dept.

Back in November you had a chance to ask Rachel Sussman about photography and her work. Her most famous project may be the Oldest Living Things in the World, a collection of organisms that are 2,000 years old and older from around the world. Below you'll find her answers to your questions.

Nature
by omfglearntoplay

Awesome work. Great images of nature just seem to hit somewhere very primal and deep. The age of these things just makes it that much more incredible.

Question: When did you decide to undertake this project and did the journey take as long as you thought it would?

Rachel: Thank you very much. It was certainly my intention to add layers of complexity to what we often gloss over in images of the natural world. Not all the organisms – or images – are beautiful, but I see natural beauty as a democratic entry point into the work. However, once you are in, I hope to invite the viewer deeper into the context and layers of content, and leave them with something to process. These elements were something I was thinking about for a long time before getting the idea itself: I wanted to make an art and science project of substance, and it took a lot of literal and figurative searching until it clicked in my mind. The idea in part was sparked by a visit to a supposedly 7,000-year-old tree in Japan, living on a remote island. I invite you to read the whole story in the introduction of my book.

In terms of the amount of time it has taken – at this point 10 years – I had no idea what I was getting into when I started it, or how long it would take. I just knew it was worth it.

Unwanted attention
by Anonymous Coward

Are you concerned that by photographing these rare organisms you may be drawing undesirable attention to them? That is, that someone might use your photos to locate them and steal or destroy them. Was there anything you did to mitigate such a risk?

Rachel: This is a great question, and something I have given a lot of thought to. It is difficult to find the right balance between sharing information – which I believe belong to us all – and overprotecting information, even with good intentions. In regard to the organisms in my project, some of them are common, public knowledge, and some are so closely guarded that I do not share anything more than the state in which they reside. In one instance, I found and photographed a type if eucalyptus that is so rare, there are only as few as four individuals left in the world. Because the name information would make it too easy to deduce its location, I had to redact both the species and common names before sharing it.

We have lost two of my 30 subjects in the past 5 years alone. One, the 3,500-year-old Senator Tree in Florida, was burnt to the ground by some kids doing meth inside the hollow of the tree, despite it being fenced off and inside a park. Another, an underground forest in Pretoria, South Africa, was bulldozed over in order to make way for a new traffic pattern.

For me, the imperative to responsibly share the wonder of these ancient organisms speaks to two primary considerations. One is that they symbolically transcend the things that divide us on a global level: there are organisms that have surpassed the 2,000-year mark on every continent; something I find to be both marvelous and hopeful. The second is that the threat of climate change threatens every single one of them, and every single one of us. My hope is that by relating to the collective tenacity, improbability, and remarkable perseverance of these organisms, they can help spark more awareness of the climate as a whole, and action to slow down the damage that we, as a species, continue to wreak.

Are there any precautions you must take?
by uslurper

Are there any precautions you must take to ensure you do not harm the organisms?

Photography is often thought of as a non-destructive process. But as a nature photographer myself, I know that equipment like tripods, lighting units, and sometimes just being there can be harmful to wildlife.

Rachel: It is of utmost importance to me that I do not cause harm to my subjects, or the environments they live in. (I try not to cause harm wherever I am, for that matter.) In some instances, specific precautions are required, but often just using common sense is enough. I travel with a minimum amount of equipment and never shoot with lights. I do not consider myself a wildlife photographer.

Anything else in common?
by g01d4

Aside from being able to reach a very old age do these species have anything else in common? For example, are their population pyramids correlated?

Rachel: As I worked on compiling a list of subjects, certain characteristics did begin to emerge. One thing I noticed early on is that a large percentage of the organisms live in fairly extreme conditions including high altitude, extreme hot or cold temperatures, low moisture, and low nutrient availability. Many are uniquely adapted to environments that are far too challenging for other organisms to survive in, let alone thrive. The other consideration is growth rate: many of the oldest organisms are incredibly slow growing. There are of course exceptions to all of these, but I do wonder, with more study, what other links can be found. There is an infographic in my book illustrating this Growth Strategy Analysis in general terms.

Published vs Personal Best Photos
by tsuliga

I am curious if your own best photos are different than your best published photos. I would think published photos would need to appeal to a larger audience while personal best photos only need to appeal to you. Have you ever had an editor say no to a photo that you thought was brilliant or amazing?

Rachel: While I haven’t experienced that, it is an interesting question. In the case of editing the photographs for my book, I was very fortunate to work with a photo editor, Christina Louise Costello, whom I selected because of her great eye and our productive and our comfortable working relationship. It was not easy to pare down thousands of images to the 125 that appear in the book, but everything in there is something we agreed both forwarded my messages yet was strong enough to stand on its own in aesthetic terms. Another consideration was that each image work at that size. For instance, in my exhibition of the Oldest Living Things, which is currently traveling, I included a couple of images that are not in the book, including one 44x54” print that is fantastic large, but would not have functioned as successfully had it appeared at a small size in the book.

How does it make you feel?
by uslurper

How do you feel being around things that were living when our culture was just at it infancy? Or knowing that the aspens may have been a shelter for early humans (just guessing) Do you feel a spiritual connection or more of a scientific respect?

Rachel: Connecting to a deeper timeframe is one of the most important tenants of the work. I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age precisely to call attention to how shallow – and how arbitrary – human timekeeping is. Considering the larger context of these long-lived organisms helps connect to those deep timescales, sometimes even to specific milestones in human development. For example, the earliest known musical instruments date back 43,000 years – almost the same age as the 43,600-year-old Tasmanian Lomatia, a self-propagating shrub that is the last of its species left on Earth, rendering it simultaneously critically endangered and theoretically immortal.

My personal appreciation for these ancient beings is layered. I can’t help but anthropomorphize their longevity, perseverance, and fortitude, and sometimes even their cleverness. My connection with them is philosophical, visceral, anchored in scientific fact, and rounded out by the stories of the scientists, my own experiences, and cultural contexts.

The really important question
by RDW

So, Nikon or Canon?

Rachel: Nope! I mostly shoot with my Mamiya 7 II, a medium format 6x7 rangefinder film camera.

Your Thoughts and Use of Post Processing?
by eldavojohn

So I'm not too knowledgeable on photography but one thing I'm aware of is that professional photographers do a lot of post processing. To the point of Adobe Lightroom or higher being so mandatory with DSLRs that they sometimes package it with lenses (especially the ones that distort like a wide angle lens). Do you post process your photos? To what extent? How do you feel about people who use advanced techniques like even adding color to their photos? For example, I came across this photo which was odd to me because I've been to that place and it's beautiful but not like in that photo -- it doesn't need fake pink clouds to be beautiful. It would seem to me a shame to have a tree live 2,000 years and then a human uses a fish eye lens on its knotted trunk to make it seem more old and gnarled and then later adjusts the darkness of the sky to give it a Halloween feel, etc. And then since that's the most artistic shot of it, that's how we remember it.

Rachel: Everybody is a photographer now, and there is no one right way to go about it. There are more – and easier – ways to enhance and manipulate images than there ever were before. What is important is the intent of the person making them. For me, I still shoot film, and I do not do anything beyond correcting my images in the traditional sense. I have nothing against digital photography, but given the large format prints I make, I still find medium format film to give me the best quality. I then scan my negatives, correct them in Photoshop, and make archival pigment prints. For the Oldest Living Things specifically, my aim was to illustrate the organisms as they are, to present their character and context in a way that felt true to the spirit of the project.

Thoughts on the future?
by Anonymous Coward

Having spent time with living things whose lifespans reach so far back into the past, what thoughts do you now have about the future? Have these encounters changed your approach to environmentalism, sustainability, future planning, or your everyday sense of time?

Rachel: My personal sense of time has expanded. I get caught up in the here and now like everyone else, but after ten years of pondering deep time, I find the depths more accessible than they used to be. Ancient lives that have borne witness to these vast expanses are a means to connect with these abstract timescales. They are hopeful. Or at least, we imbue our hopes on them. There are individuals over 2,000 years old on every continent, which serves as a reminder that we are all on this planet together and transcends the things that divide us. The Oldest Living Things are like living beacons of perseverance, surviving against increasingly mounting odds. Every single one of them (and every single one of us) is threatened by climate change. My hope is that they can help others engage in more environmentally aware and sustainable lives, and embrace long-term thinking.

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