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On June 24th 2012, Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island Giant Tortoise species, died of Natural Causes at an estimated age of 100. Two years and two months after his death I was awestruck to see George posed regal and pristine at The American Museum of Natural History. I was so excited and shocked by the encounter that I forgot to take a picture. Recently I have been thinking more about my encounter with the bones and flesh of the recently extinct. What would our interaction have been like had he still been alive? I turned to photography as I often do to act out how my ideal encounter with Lonesome George would have been as well as confronting realities of nature in the Anthropocene, a place George was not born into but did die in. Using researched information on the Pinta Island Tortoise diet I prepared a picnic that I could have Shared with George. I have also included a framed 5x7 photograph of Lonesome George’s body being prepared for taxidermy. This allows the viewer to more confront George’s reality of being dead and as the last of his species being the most dead, extinct. I have placed the picnic spread on pavement and allowed elements (hyperobjects, non-recycled recyclables) of the surrounding area into the frame to help represent our new epoch, The Anthropocene. A time that will continue to exist in the post Lonesome George age we all now inhabit.
