Lori Nix (born 1969) is a photographer based in Brooklyn, NY who has been building and photographing dioramas since the early 1990s. Her work has been widely collected and exhibited internationally.
Lori Nix was born in Norton, Kansas, in 1969, and graduated from Truman State University where she studied ceramics, and photography. She went on to study photography at the graduate level at Ohio University, and moved to New York in 1999.
Process
Nix considers herself a “faux landscape photographer,” and her work is influenced by extreme weather and disaster films. She works without digital manipulation, using miniatures and models to create surreal scenes and landscapes, building dioramas that range from 20 inches to six feet in diameter. They take several months to build, and two to three weeks to photograph. For many years Nix used a large format 8 × 10 film camera but in 2015 she started photographing her dioramas with a Canon 5Ds d-SLR camera. Nix works with her partner Kathleen Gerber, a trained glass artist, at home in Brooklyn, NY, constructing most of the scenery by hand from scratch, using "foam and glue and paint and anything else handy." After the final photograph is made, Nix harvests the diorama for pieces for future use and then destroys it. Nix and Gerber also design and fabricate sets for video.
Photography
The City, 2005–2013. A post-apocalyptic vision wherein Nix explores what it would be like to be one of the last remaining people living in a city, imagining indoor urban scenes.
Unnatural History, 2009. A series of tiny dioramas of rooms in imaginary museums, partly inspired by New York's American Museum of Natural History.
Lost, 2003–2004. Nix "subverts the traditions of landscape photography in order to create her own humorously dark world," examining feelings of isolation and loneliness.
Some Other Place, 2000–2002. Made after Nix moved to New York in 1999, featured neighborhood sidewalks, city parks, and forays into the wilderness.
Accidentally Kansas, 1998–2000. Tornadoes, floods, insect infestations, and other bizarre events that featured during her childhood in the American Midwest.
Video
A City Severed, 2012. A short film that recreates the 1863 New York City draft riots in miniature, produced with Four Story Treehouse.
The Story of Sushi, 2012. A short film about sustainable sushi in miniature, produced with Four Story Treehouse.
Publications
Contact Sheet 117: The Light Work Annual. Light Work, 2002.
Contact Sheet 119 Lori Nix: Waiting to Happen, Light Work. Light Work, 2002
Small Dangers. Miniature Disasters and Mayhem. Self-published, Blurb, 2010.
Lori Nix: The City. Decode Books, 2013. With an essay by Barbara Pollack.
Lori Nix. The Power of Nature. Wienand, 2015. ISBN 978-3-86832-274-3.
Selected solo exhibitions
2010: "The City," ClampArt.
2011: "Unnatural History" and "The City," CEPA Gallery, Rochester, New York.
2011: "The City," Catherine Edelman Gallery.
2011: "The City," Flippo Gallery, Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia.
