Interviews: Ask Rachel Sussman About Photography and the Oldest Living Things

samzenpus writes Rachel Sussman is a photographer whose work covers the junction of art, science, and philosophy. Perhaps her most famous work is the "Oldest Living Things in the World" project. Working with biologists, she traveled all over the world to find and photograph organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Sussman gave a TED talk highlighting parts of the project including a clonal colony of quaking aspen 80,000-years-old and 2,000-year-old brain coral off Tobago's coast. Rachel has agreed to put down her camera and answer any questions you may have about photography or any of her projects. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Comments

So why was 2,000 years the cutoff and not 50,000?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just because you wanted the brain coral pictures?

Unwanted attention

[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?

And so Where Is Mel Brooks?

[retroworks]

Oy. The 2,000 year old man must be what? 2030, 2040 by now?

Anything else in common?

[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?

The Junction of X, Y, and Z

[kruach aum]

How do you photograph philosophy?

How do we define old?

[mythosaz]

How do we define old? Do aspen groves count? If so, if I give birth to identical twins, are they one organism for the purpose of counting age, or must they be conjoined?

What about Turritopsis dohrnii? Or are pictures of tiny jellyfish uninteresting?

Any thoughts about the real ages of Adwaita, Henry, Tu'i Malila, Harriet,or Timothy? Do you think they have any thoughts about us? :)

Re:How do we define old?

[Anonymous Coward]

Old implies something that lives beyond it's average life span. Do moss and trees that live on average thousands of years count? Or oaks that lasted hundreds of years beyond others?

Are there any precausions you must take?

[uslurper]

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

Photography is often thought of as a non-destuctive 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.

Published vs Personal Best Photos

[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?

How does it make you feel?

[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?

Your Thoughts and Use of Post Processing?

[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.

Re:Your Thoughts and Use of Post Processing?

[Anonymous Coward]

All digital photographs are post-processed. Even if you are dumping jpegs straight out of your camera, the raw sensor data has been highly processed. Heck, just converting a RAW file to any other format with zero adjustments is post-processing, since you have to assign a color gamut to the sensor data, which itself has a bearing on rendering characteristics. Heck, even when developing transparencies back in the film days, developing timing and chemistry significantly affected the look of photos. And that's before print enlargement.

Re:Your Thoughts and Use of Post Processing?

[AK Marc]

By that definition, all print photography is post-processed as well.

Re: Your Thoughts and Use of Post Processing?

[mattlamb]

Fake? Please stop talking about someone else's work of which clearly you have no technical experience. These pink clouds are often seen in Australia in the late evening.
I have photographed far more extreme pink rainbow clouds in Australia see blog https://mattlamb2001.wordpress... .
Where we point our cameras has more affect on the image than any post processing or printing side effects
.

Re: Your Thoughts and Use of Post Processing?

[mattlamb]

Scroll down just past the ants!

The really important question

[RDW]

So, Nikon or Canon?

Re:The really important question

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you can screw around with them, but if you want a serious digital nature rig, you are looking elsewhere.

Nature

[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?

Photography disappointing

[Anonymous Coward]

Rachel Sussman is a pretty good photographer and the TED talk she gives is about riviting; she speaks well, very intelligent, engaging. I'm a little ashamed to give criticism, but the photos in the TED talk were a little bit... disappointing... no zip. Perhaps she saved the best shots for her openings.

exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

I come across cryptic and supposedly extinct species but likely would never reveal where or even what they are since I know you can trust people to kill it shortly after they figure out where it is. Good stories but you have to be very carefull who you tell and how much.

Re:exactly

[Xest]

Plant life is one area where CITES can often be counter-productive.

The problem is that many rare plants that are found smuggled and seized by customs just end up getting burnt under the principle that they want to avoid anyone using customs itself as a back door route for bringing stuff into the country - i.e. bring it in, let customs seize it, then buy it back through a third party.

Ideally these specimens would instead be sent to botanical institutes and nurseries to cultivate for commercial sales which would remove pressure on in-habitat populations.

A friend who is a botanist in South America and has several newly discovered species to his name actually has to go through the process of distributing seeds for such species to such people he knows worldwide before he's named and described the plant, because stupidly it's legal to do so due to the fact it has not yet been described and hence cannot by definition be given a CITES rating that is used to prohibit movement in the first place. By distributing them legally as he does it ensures that nurserymen can start providing these new species commercially after he has formally described the species and after it has received a CITES certification meaning that there is little to no pressure on illegal collection of the species in the wild because people can just obtain them legally from the nurseries.

It's all very backwards, but the focus should be on better enabling ex-situ conservation such that those with the facilities to breed a new and/or endangered species can do so hence greatly reducing and often even removing the threat of habitat extinction.

For what it's worth though, for this particular photographer in question looking at her pictures I believe pretty much all the specimens on her site are widely known and well policed - I've seen some myself and for others I've known people who have visited. The locations of I think all these things are I believe neither secret nor hard to find so I don't think she's putting much at risk here. Whether there are more in her book whose locations are secret I've no idea though.

What surprises you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for your excellent, mind-expanding work. With all that you have seen in your research, what surprises you the most?

Thoughts on the future?

[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?

a big one

[slashmydots]

Do you think that pollution, radioactive materials, and climate change are going to start harming these ancient creatures in a way that they didn't have to worry about many years prior?

Cheating

[jpkunst]

Saying that colonial organism like corals are tens of thousands years old is cheating IMO. The colony may be that old but the individual polyps are not.

You might as well say that the city of Rome is a 2500 year old "organism".