Since 2008 Doherty has been building a massive and ongoing project, Archiving Eden, in collaboration with biologists around the world to document seed banks, ever more important in an era of climate change, species extinction, and declining biodiversity. In works ranging from X-rays of individual seeds to architectural images of seed vaults to participatory installations where visitors exchange seeds for photographs, Archiving Eden considers what it means to research, collect, and preserve against present and future threats.

While some of Doherty’s images magnify the tiny seeds, monumentalizing their life-giving potential, this one zooms out to provide a peek into an incubator at a research center run by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, where precious seeds are carefully tested and germinated. The precise environmental controls and technology required to maintain seeds parallels other repositories like human gene banks or even museums.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)