Photographer Documents the World's Oldest Living Things

In 2004, Rachel Sussman, a Brooklyn-based photographer who is a mere 37 years old, visited a Japanese cedar rumored to be 7,000 years old. Imbued with a sense of the fragility and persistence of life, she began a mission of researching and photographing individual organisms that were at least 2,000 years old—“a way of putting human timekeeping in perspective,” she says.