“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” So begins the last paragraph of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For Darwin, life is not reducible to bits of genetic code or DNA, but is something in constant flux, where mutation is everything and fixed categories are exceptionally misleading. There is a certain irony in the title of Darwin’s book: his ideas strongly suggest that the notion of species (as a stable category) is a poor way to think about life forms. Moreover, the notion that particular life forms have clear origins in the entangled mass of mutation and flux is similarly untenable.
C-Print
48 × 60 in.
There is more information on The Last Pictures project here.
And there is also a publication about this project, which you can find here.