The Oldest Living Things in the World: Photographs by Rachel Sussman

From 23 Nov 2010 to 26 Feb 2011

24 November - 27 February 2011. For five years American photographer Rachel Sussman has been working towards an exhibition of photographs taken around the world of over 25 continuously living organisms aged 2,000 years or older.

Her photographs include images of an 80,000-year-old clonal colony of Aspen trees in Utah, a half-million-year-old bacteria living in permafrost in Siberia, and a 2,000-year-old primitive conifer in the Namibian desert.

The work on show in the Botanical Museum was primarily developed with medium format colour film and is displayed as archival pigment exhibition prints while the other images were made using digital optical microscopy and underwater equipment.