Living in a dystopian time of international and local tensions, wars, and environmental issues, it is obscurely tempting to fantasise about the world after a disaster, nuclear or natural. The two Cleveland-based artists, Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber make real-life dioramas depicting the world after nature took over our manmade cities. They find it both chilling and exciting to depict a world after humankind has gone. Even though the photo works depict unearthly scenes, there is a glimmer of hope and even humour, but humility prevails. “If you think about the entire universe, we're just a blip.”

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Published in issue #1 2024, Creative Photography

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One of the earlier series called Accidentally Kansas was based on Nix’s childhood experiences in Kansas and already shows the general feeling of angst, as if people are waiting for something destructive to happen. The idea resulted from a mix of different elements: recent happenings merged with early experiences. Nix: “We started to make this series after 9/11. We lived in New York City and heard the sirens for a long time. I've been interested in this dystopian setting since I was a little child growing up in midwestern Kansas. In Kansas, in the middle of the United States, there are a lot of tornadoes, ice storms, and blizzards. It was quite destructive. So maybe it came from there.”

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Many scenes in the works of Nix and Gerber seem to have occurred immediately after a disaster. In the photo Bar, people appear to have left in a second; in the Beauty Shop, clients have gone, leaving chairs empty and a hairdryer on the floor. Same in the Laundromat and Vacuum Showroom. All kinds of urban entertainment got wiped out on the spot. Nix remembered the same effect after a tornado in Kansas. “A day after the tornado, I went out with my friends in the woods and came across a stove that had been taken out of a house. This beautiful baked ham was still sitting inside, just ready to eat. It was so amazing that it had stayed exactly the way it was. Mother nature is weird.”

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‍Empire

Even though you might feel light humour in the depicted scenes, you can’t avoid seeing a heavy theme in the different series. In the series Empire, we see abandoned urban landscapes, dilapidated, moss-overgrown buildings, empty flyovers of highways, empty newspaper-selling machines and coin-operated binoculars falling to the ground. The scenes remind the viewer of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Nix: “It's not just one big heavy message. You get light bits, learn about the culture, and maybe some philosophy is involved. I don't think we're interested in just showing a big, flooded city or anything, but we want to bring in elements of humanity. In The City series, we would show nature coming back; even if it is mould, nature will take over. And in its own way, there's something very optimistic about that, despite us as humans. Hopefully, trees and nature will regain their life in their own way. We forget we're just one little part of a much bigger macroscope. The fact that we, as humans, haven't been here for very long. If you think about the entire universe, we're just a blip.”

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If you think about the entire universe, we’re just a blip.

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The artist duo show in their work that we are a tiny part of the universe. In one of the images, Control Room, we see a comical allusion to our inability to control our lives because, obviously, there is no control anymore. Nix: “That was inspired by Chernobyl. When I was working at that photo lab, one of our photographer clients, Robert Polidori, was one of the first photographers allowed into it to be photographed. I was doing his contacts, his 8x10 contacts. So, I got to see what it looked like, and I just took that inspiration and made Control Room.”

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I’ve been interested in this dystopian setting since I was a little child growing up in midwestern Kansas.

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Black and white

Among all colour series, we find one in black and white: Unnatural History, which raised the question of why this was shot in grey tones. “I had the opportunity to buy a case of black and white film, and it sat in our refrigerator for a couple of years, after which it expired. A prominent gallery dealer in New York City was being interviewed, and she said that black and white photography was dead. Well, if it's dead, I'm interested in it. We decided to do this series while we were still working on The City. We wanted to do something that would be a little faster, more humorous, to kind of take us out of the grind of a seven-month project where we could do something that would only take a couple of weeks and more humorous.”

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Forging ideas

Even when the central theme is clear, forging ideas for every diorama takes time, many ponderings, and notebooks. Nix: “I kept a running tally on my phone of all the different types of places we could build. And then I would see what Kathleen would be interested in because it will be five or seven months of our life, so you have to want to do it, to begin with. And from there, we'd look at books for inspiration. Or sometimes we see location in the city. The Chinese Takeout was based on the restaurant around the corner from where we lived. We just went in and photographed it and started from there.”

New York as a city is also a primary source of input for ideas, as well as newspapers and magazines. Gerber: “Lori's got a whole list of ideas for images. The walking dunes of Namibia were the inspiration for the subway.”

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‍Handmade dioramas

All the photographed real-life dioramas are handmade. The artist couple show incredible patience to construct them for months or even a year. At the beginning of their career, they worked only at night. “We had day jobs, so we would just work on them in the evening and on the weekends, just sitting in our worktables and picking away things. We knew it would take a while because we could only work on it in short sections.”

For the dioramas, they used a wide variety of materials. Kathleen Gerber: “We use polystyrene and different construction materials you can buy at your Home Depot. I also use paper pulp, paint, wood, plaster, and many traditional things. We must calculate exactly the different scales in which we make the diorama. When we're thinking about a scene, there's always one object we didn't want to make and could buy. Take, for example, the Anatomy Classroom. We were able to get a little skeleton from Amazon. Once we have that skeleton, we scale the whole scene around it.”

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8x10 films

The first series was shot on 8x10-inch film, which made it quite hard to obtain the necessary depth of field. Lori Nix explains: “We used a super wide-angle lens. The lens was practically parked inside the dioramas. I cranked it down to f 64, as small as possible. I pumped my studio strobes, sometimes 35 times, to build up that density on the negative. The exposures took 20 to 30 minutes.”

Afterwards, they turned to digital capture, which created the problem of needing larger files for big prints. “Then I started shooting in sections, and then in Photoshop, I stitch them together.”

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The lens was practically parked inside the dioramas.

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No Photoshop tricks

Apart from the necessary stitching, no Photoshop tricks are involved, like merging different layers. “We and technology do not go hand in hand. I worked in a lab as a traditional colour printer. I could shoot film, process it, and then print my work. I didn't have any need for Photoshop because I could do all the magic right there on film. It wasn't until we stepped away from film and started shooting digitally that we began working with Photoshop, but only to stitch the many shots of our dioramas, not fabricate the scenes.”

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Both of us come from a craft background. I did glass blowing, sculpture and printmaking. Lori did a lot of ceramics.

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Kathleen Gerber: “Both of us come from a craft background. I did glass blowing, sculpture and printmaking. Lori did a lot of ceramics. So, innately, we like working with our hands and gravitate towards that much more. Instead of sitting at a computer, it feels more isolated than if we're both working at a table. While working we listen to music and talk together. It's just a nicer experience.”

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About

Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber are Brooklyn-based artists whose dioramas and miniatures are captured in unsettling photographs. Lori Nix, who grew up in a small, rural town in western Kansas, channels an ongoing fascination with the natural disasters that she experienced as a child. Nix and Gerber have collaborated on dioramas and miniatures for over twenty years; their work has primarily been the subject matter for their fine art photography.

Lori Nix was born in Norton, Kansas, in 1969. She graduated from Truman State University in 1993. She then studied photography at the graduate level at Ohio University and moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1999, where she has lived and worked for almost 20 years.

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www.lorinix.net