| I consider myself a faux landscape photographer. I meticulously build miniature model landscapes and interior environments and photograph the results. As an artist, I have always looked to the physical world around me for inspiration. My work is a direct reflection of my own landscape, with a particular bent towards disaster and decay. By actually constructing the scenes, I am able to select these aspects and reshape the focus. The idea is to trick the viewer, but only for a second, because my photographs will never fool anyone. The humor is grounded within the lie, the combination of disaster married with humor. |  |
Photographs That Will Never Fool Anyone – Lori Nix
I consider myself a faux landscape photographer. I meticulously build miniature model landscapes and interior environments and photograph the results. As an artist, I have always looked to the physical world around me for inspiration. My work is a direct reflection of my own landscape, with a particular bent towards disaster and decay. By actually constructing the scenes, I am able to select these aspects and reshape the focus. The idea is to trick the viewer, but only for a second, because my photographs will never fool anyone. The humor is grounded within the lie, the combination of disaster married with humor.
When I began building my tabletop dioramas, my childhood experiences with nature provided the subject matter. I was born in a small town in northwestern Kansas called Norton, which had, at the time, a population of 3,500 people, two stoplights and plenty of open space through which to roam. I lived in a neighborhood surrounded by pastures and woods, where, as a child, I fell out of trees and got stuck in mud and snow so deep that I had to leave my shoes behind. I would also spend afternoons with the neighborhood kids lighting tumbleweeds and leaves on fire: a typical childhood.
I have always dealt with adversity through humor, and have tried to find the silver lining, or rather, the inside joke underneath much of my suffering. These colorful childhood experiences inspired the body of work “Accidentally Kansas” in which I reanimated my personal history with much embellishment. As a child, I spent many hours staring up at the contrails crisscrossing the sky, wishing for one of those planes to come down and rescue me from my boredom. When a tornado ripped through my neighborhood I wasn’t afraid at all, and rather anticipated exploring the aftermath.
I would also consider my work a product of “disaster flicks,” such as Towering Inferno, Airport 76, Earthquake and, my personal favorite, Planet of the Apes. This type of devastation and destruction satisfied a lust for drama and an overactive imagination, aspects of myself that have influenced the photographs that I create.
Living in New York for the last eight years has had a profound mark upon my work as well. I’m surrounded by the city’s rich architecture, reflecting a wealth of craftsmanship and beauty, as well as the grit and pressures of daily urban life. I continue to work with the landscape, but the color palette is more subdued and the compositions become increasingly complex.
The series “Some Other Place” and “Lost” concentrate on the darker edges at which the urban and rural intersect, and where everyday life becomes dangerous, unexplained and haphazard. Like with my previous work, these series continue to blur the lines between truth and illusion while maintaining an element of dark humor. My current body of work, “Shadows of the City,” recreates interiors synonymous with urban surroundings. Public spaces, some previously grand, lie deteriorating and neglected with the apparent absence of human beings as nature slowly reclaims these sites. What kind of tragedy—environmental or man-made—could have caused this destruction? The tension lies in the marrying of opulence with catastrophe. As with all of my images, the narrative is perpetually open to interpretation, allowing the viewers to bring their own personal experiences to complete meaning I deliberately left unfinished. For me, I still believe there is hope that lies in this decay and the subsequent rebirth of existence.
It is often easy to think that the so-called “golden age” has come and gone, that our history is carefree and unbridled; I know this to be untrue. The past is also laden with apprehensions and fears, just different from those within the present. The decades of Cold War diplomacy have been replaced by new fears of religious extremism. Indeed, the natural world seems to have caught up to the fast-paced, high-tech world of humans, and it is not happy. One cannot help but feel we are on a path to self-destruction. In these post- 9/11 times, the world I once saw through a child’s eyes with humor and irony now rings with melancholy and tentative action. When faced with such overwhelming circumstances, like most people, I search for something familiar, something that brings it all back to a human condition to which I can relate. I look at my surroundings and try to take pleasure in the absurdities of everyday life, and, through it all, continue whistling in the dark.
