In 2019 the Dutch publisher Eriskay Connection released Deep Time, a 176-page book in which the American photographer Lynn Alleva Lilley turns her attention to the horseshoe crab. The title borrows from geology: the span of the Earth’s history, roughly 4.5 billion years. Lilley’s subject has occupied a comparable order of magnitude, persisting some 450 million years, and its annual spawning on the high tides of the new and full moons in May and June draws it into the rhythms of sun and moon rather than the human calendar.
The photographs were made in Lewes, Delaware, on the surrounding beaches, and through microscopes in a laboratory, the product of a sustained period of study that began when Lilley saw a horseshoe crab swimming on its back. Working across field and laboratory registers, she moves between the animal’s scale and our own, and between the immediacy of observation and the longer view that the term deep time implies. The sequencing was constructed by Lilley with the book’s designer, Rob van Hoesel, whose design draws on encyclopedias and nineteenth-century illustrated works of natural history.
Two writers accompany the images without explaining them away. The poet Jane Hirshfield contributes a poem, and Helen J. Bullard, a research-based storyteller, an essay. Neither is a photographer here; the photographic authorship is Lilley’s alone, and the book’s argument is visual first. Taken together, the photographs, poem, and essay consider where human beings sit within evolution and among other living forms, and what it means to share a planet with something so much older than ourselves.
For collectors, the book is worth attention for the coherence of its making. Concept, photography, and narrative construction are credited to Lilley, design to van Hoesel, with lithography, production, printing, binding, and the making of the slipcase credited to separate Dutch specialists. This division of labor is legible in the object: a classic hardcover in a slipcase, 20 by 28.1 centimeters, in which art and science are allowed to inform one another rather than merely coexist.
