Artist Rachel Sussman is a time traveler. She writes in “The Oldest Living Things in the World” that she crisscrossed the globe photographing living organisms at least 2,000 years old to encourage “an anthropomorphic connection to a deep timescale that, more often than not, is too physiologically challenging for our brains to hold onto.” The llareta shown here, which Sussman shot in the Atacama Desert, in Chile, is only about 3,000 years old — which seems juvenile compared with the soil sample containing Siberian Actinobacteria, which dates to 400,000 to 600,000 years old.
This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.
But there’s something striking about these alien-looking shrubs, so green in the desert and so dense with branches they look like boulders. The llareta, Sussman writes, grows no more than a centimeter a year.
— Printers Row Journal editors
“The Oldest Living Things in the World”
By Rachel Sussman, University of Chicago, 270 pages, $45
