Hundreds of Photographs of Seed Bank Samples From Around the World, Recording Plant Diversity by X-Ray

“Archiving Eden shows viewers another way of looking at nature, and it draws in people who know nothing about seed banks. If seed banks stopped working, the plants we live on would disappear, the animals would disappear, and in the end we would disappear too.”

Since 2008, Dornith Doherty, a professor at the University of North Texas, has used X-ray equipment to record a staggering number of seed samples from seed banks around the world. She named this vast, living archive of images “Archiving Eden.” The work continues today.

Seed banks are central to preserving the genetic diversity of species. Most were built to guard against the loss of genes in a regional or global crisis, and they matter most to countries with unstable governments or threatened environments — which is why they are called “Noah’s Ark for food.” There are now 1,400 seed banks worldwide.

In 2008, on the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, the Norwegian government built a vault to hold the world’s crop seeds: the “Svalbard Global Seed Vault” (Svalbard globale frøhvelv). It cost $9 million, can survive earthquakes and nuclear attack, and lets users from any country deposit seeds free of charge and take them out at any time. Its money comes mainly from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and from governments around the world.

In February 2018, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault marked its tenth anniversary. By then it held more than 1 million seed samples. Its full capacity is 2.25 billion seeds from 4.5 million crop varieties.

In 2008, Dornith Doherty read that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault had been completed in an article in The New Yorker. It was her first encounter with seed banks, and it connected to the years she had already spent documenting landscapes shaped by people. In 2003, with a grant from the Japan Foundation, Doherty spent three months in Kyoto photographing Japanese garden landscapes and began collecting still-life specimens.

From then until 2008, Doherty followed the Rio Grande — the river where American and Mexican cultures meet — photographing it all the way from Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico and collecting still-life objects and historical specimens as she went: prickly ash plants, corn cobs, soil, clothing, vinyl car seats. The result was the project “Rio Grande: Burnt Water (2002-2008).”

The Rio Grande runs the length of the long U.S.-Mexico border, past farmland, managed forests, factories in northern Mexico and crowded cities. She wrote on her website: “This work sets out to record the increasingly complex relationship between the natural environment and human institutions. It deals with cultural landscapes, and reflects the state of water and land after they have been reapportioned by a set of human problems, including politics, migration and economic inequality.”

Doherty sorted the images she had shot along the river, then projected them, lit, onto the still-life specimens she had gathered, and used the result as the finished photographs — a complex, delicate landscape made by people. The project took her six years.

The seed bank work, Doherty says, “blends extreme pessimism and extreme optimism,” as she told Smithsonian. Faced with the severity of climate change, falling biodiversity and a shrinking agricultural sector, seed institutions, scientists and volunteers around the world are still building the first “global backup system for plants” — meaning the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

For Archiving Eden, Doherty worked with some of the most comprehensive international seed banks in the world, and with biologists: the United States Department of Agriculture, the Agricultural Research Service, the Millennium Seed Bank, the Royal Botanic Gardens, PlantBank, and Kings Park in Australia.

She also visited seed banks all over the world and went deep inside them, gathering the holdings of the 20 largest vaults on five continents, photographing the interiors of these privately and publicly funded institutions, and setting down in detail the spaces and the techniques this conservation work involves.

That sub-project is called “Archiving Eden: The Vaults.” She was also let into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opens only a few days a year, and photographed the seed boxes sent there from different countries. “You’re standing in the Arctic, and yet you’re in one of the most biodiverse places there is. It was a very moving experience.”

Doherty wrote: “As part of a global system of plant conservation, these privately and publicly funded institutions make sure that, when catastrophe or civil unrest destroys a critical ecosystem, somewhere in the world there is still a chance to bring the species back.”

Inside seed banks, X-ray machines are normally used to judge whether a seed is still alive and what condition it is in. Doherty saw that the same machines could record the samples as well.

As Archiving Eden went on, she X-rayed small plants of every kind — potato clones, sunflowers, alfalfa, corn, acacia — then sorted the results, collaging the images or turning them into prints of very fine detail, work that usually took a long time.

She also made lenticular images of seeds. The ridged surface shifts as the viewer moves, so the picture changes with the angle, a little like animation.

“Documentary photographs of seed bank facilities can’t reach that feeling of deep wonder. X-rays, as a medium, let people experience what they cannot otherwise see, like the inside of a seed pod. It makes plants look ghostly and fleeting,” she told Smithsonian.

One of the works, More Than This, shows a blue grid holding more than 4,800 seeds. Each seed was X-rayed on its own. Five thousand is the number regarded as the minimum needed to save a species from extinction.

Another print, 1400 Ash Tree Seeds, was scanned at the seed bank in Fort Collins. The ash trees in the image have been eaten away by the introduced emerald ash borer, which once cut ash numbers in the United States to a fraction of what they were and brought the tree to the edge of extinction.

Archiving Eden is now 11 years old. Doherty is currently building two installations, one in Australia and one in Toronto, both involving plants and seeds.

“Dornith Doherty’s photographs are unusual on an emotional level, and that matters just as much for species conservation,” said Florence Oxley, a biologist at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center seed bank, speaking to the magazine.

“They show viewers another way of looking at nature, and at the same time they draw in people who know nothing about seed banks. People should realize that if seed banks didn’t do this, the plants we live on would disappear, the animals would disappear, and in the end we would disappear too,” she said — and she called Doherty’s X-ray images of seed banks “a sexy thing.”

The cover image and all photographs in this article come from Dornith Doherty’s personal website.