News and Features

Think TV: The Global Seed Vault — as Art

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Dornith Doherty, a photographer and art professor at the University of North Texas, was inspired by a New Yorker story (“Sowing for Apocalypse”) about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — which preserves the world’s biodiversity inside a mountain in Norway 800 miles south of the North Pole. There are actually 1400 seed banks in the world, and Doherty, who was already interested in brilliantly colorful, restored and preserved landscapes, began to X-ray and magnify and photograph some of the seeds — for her project, “Archiving Eden.”

Verdant Ring, photograph by Dornith Doherty, 2008