Lori Nix – The Living Room

I became a fan of photographer, Lori Nix, while researching the graphic to represent my website, Searching for Light in the Darkness.  Every author wants to find that perfect header graphic that best captures the brand.  No shortage of candidates for apocalyptic and dystopian settings, Lori had a unique presentation of forsaken places.  I settled on The Library, where a tree stretches to the broken roof of a derelict library in search of better light.

Lori Nix, is a self-described, non-traditional photographer who constructs her subjects (rather than look for them). Her lifelike photographs begin as dioramas—some as small as 50×60 centimeters—that she builds with her creative partner, Kathleen Gerber, who adds aging and deteriorating effects. “We have a great symbiotic relationship—I build them, and she helps destroy them,” Nix says. The scenes recall the 1970s disaster movies she grew up watching, images of crumbling buildings and abandoned subways, with nature overgrowing the built environment.

Lori working on set

Her collection, The City, is an imagined city of our future, where something either natural or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of its human inhabitants. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly taking them over. Insects, Flora, and fauna fill dilapidated spaces, reclaiming what was theirs before man’s encroachment.

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