Readers will remember Lori Nix and her glorious photo collection”Unnatural History.” As it happens, Ms. Nix has been working for even longer on another series, one that centers on intricate dioramas that she constructs and shoots in her Brooklyn apartment.
From the description of the book that captures the work:
Over the past eight years, Lori Nix (born 1969) has created meticulously detailed model environments and then photographed them–locations within a fictional city that celebrate modern culture, knowledge and innovation. But her monuments of civilization are abandoned, in a state of ruin where nature has begun to repopulate the spaces. “I am fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with the idea of the apocalypse. In addition to my childhood experiences growing up with natural disasters in Kansas, I also watched disaster flicks in the 1970s. Each of these experiences has greatly influenced my photographic work.” Nix considers herself a “faux landscape photographer” and spends months building the complex spaces before photographing them. As critic Sidney Lawrence wrote in Art in America: “Oddly endearing, terrifying and often electrifyingly plausible, [Nix’s tableaux] prod us to ponder the fact that, like it or not, our fate is uncertain”
Explore more of Nix’s post-apocalyptic metropolis (and find links to her other work) here.
* Marcus Terentius Varro
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As we don’t even try to keep ’em down on the farm, we might recall that it was on this date in 1861 that Anaheim, California got it first post office and its inaugural Postmaster, John Fischer. Four years earlier, a group of German immigrants, disillusioned with their lot as prospectors in Northern California, moved south to grow grapes; a group of 50 of them settled in what is now Anaheim and founded the town.
Within a few decades the grapes were long gone. Anaheim developed first into an industrial center, producing electronics, aircraft parts and canned fruit, then into a travel destination: it is, of course, the site of the Disneyland Resort, the collection of theme parks and hotels that opened in 1955, Angel Stadium, Honda Center, and the Anaheim Convention Center, the largest convention center on the West Coast.
Then
