Syrian refugee girls imagine their futures

Today I want to share an experiential futures project cocreated with a group of individuals usually pushed to the margins in every way. Here they appear in the spotlight, with a call for their dreams to be recognised and their voices heard.

Hiba, aged 9. Vision: future paediatrician. "I have always wanted to help children. I am kind and loving, and therefore an excellent doctor that children can trust."
Photos and captions: Meredith Hutchison / International Rescue Committee [via IBT]

The premise of "Vision Not Victim", created by photographer Meredith Hutchison, is straightforward. The girls are asked about what they want to be when they grow up, and then they do a photo shoot where they dress up as if it has happened, and talk about how it came to be, speaking as their future selves.

Supported by the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian and aid organisation, this iteration of the program was carried out in Syrian refugee camps in Jordan (video), after being piloted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (video).

IRC explains:

Every girl designs and directs her own shoot where she poses as her future self — achieving a goal. Whenever possible, we try to do these shoots on location, in actual working environments, so girls can meet people in their envisioned field and truly step into their future. 

As empowering as the photo shoot experience itself may be, the outcomes don't stop there: "Perhaps the most moving and impactful part of the program is the moment when the girls share their photographs. They beam as they receive their images and run to show parents and friends."

An opportunity to see and do differently ripples outward from this bold declaration of possibility.

Haja, aged 12. Vision: future astronaut. "Ever since we studied the solar system in primary school, I have wanted to be an astronaut. I love being an astronaut because it lets me see the world from a new angle. In this society my path was not easy – many people told me a girl can’t become an astronaut. Now that I have achieved my goals, I would tell young girls with aspirations to not be afraid, to talk to their parents about what they want and why, to always be confident and know where you want to go."

Fatima, aged 16. Vision: future architect. "When I was young people told me that this is not something a woman could achieve, and they encouraged me to pursue a more 'feminine' profession. Now that I’ve reached my vision, I hope I am a model for other girls."

Fatima, aged 12. Vision: future teacher. "In this image, it is the early morning and I am waiting in my classroom for my students to arrive. I teach younger children to read and write Arabic."

Amani, aged 10. Vision: future pilot. "I love planes. I finished my studies and found a way to get to flight school. Now, not only do I get to live my dream, but I also get to help people travel, to see the world, and discover new places."

Muntaha, aged 12. Vision: future photographer. "As a professional photographer I use my images to inspire hope in others – to encourage love and understanding."

Notice how they speak from inside the future scenario, visualising and roleplaying their accomplishment; not "I want to..." but "I have..."

The import of this shift in imagination can be profound. Here's an example related by the photographer, reported by CNN:

Hutchison remembers one girl who was engaged to be married though she was younger than 13. (The photographer asked that the girl's name not be used to protect her identity.)

"I distinctly remember the moment when we showed her parents her vision images. Her mom was just ecstatic and her father ... was absolutely silent -- and smiling -- but silent, thumbing through the images.

"I think he was just in awe that this could be his daughter."

By the end of the program, the parents had called off their daughter's engagement and had committed to helping her finish her education.

That's the power of the photographs -- something unquantifiable happens to the girls, Hutchison says. 

I recently read Rebecca Solnit's book Hope in the Dark. which focuses especially on citizens and activists pursuing what may appear to be lost causes. It's an extraordinary work –– I wholeheartedly recommend Solnit's writing in general –– and her analysis of how hope functions manages to be simultaneously tough-minded, filled with compassion, and uplifting.

To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. [...] Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity––seeing the troubles in the world––and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.

In a similar spirit, it's elevating to find a project carried out in such desperate circumstances, contributing to the possibility of those circumstances being transformed.

And it brings us back to an issue we've noted before: foresight is a right. Everyone should be able to think about the future, but not everyone gets that chance.

Having attempted at various times to narrow that gap by bringing futures to life in unscripted environments (albeit so far in no setting as fraught with complexities as a Syrian refugee camp must be), I have great appreciation for what Meredith and her collaborators have done here.

We can readily grasp the transformative potential of a well-wrought experiential scenario –– that is, making a possible future vividly available to think and feel today –– whether at the scale of a country (as in Tunisia, during the Arab Spring, with the aspirational 16juin2014 campaign); a group (as in Hawaii 2050); or an individual (as in Derren Brown's apocalyptic wakeup call to one troubled English kid, which painstakingly simulated the end of the world exclusively for him). But examples as fully realised as these can be resource intensive.

Vision not Victim is based on a conceptually simple, apparently inexpensive, yet deeply personal intervention. It invites a young person to vividly articulate –– enact, actually –– a preferred future, and so enable a powerful reperceiving of potential awaiting activation in the present.

(More than a year after first hearing about this project, I've noticed that its structure appears to describe the same arc as the generic Ethnographic Experiential Futures process recently shared here: MAP [unearthing a preferred personal future, in this case] > MEDIATE [staging the photo shoot] > MOUNT [sharing the photos with the girls and their families] > MAP [capturing reactions].)

The opportunities and challenges around the right to foresight are, of course, not evenly distributed. This becomes particularly obvious when we think about it as an ongoing rather than a one-time need.

Consider the work of education designer and futurist Amy Satterthwaite, formerly a Toronto schoolteacher (and one of my teaching assistants at Duke University's TIP futures summer school a few years ago - video). She is now working to change schools through Ashoka Canada.

In her award-winning final MDes project at OCAD, Foresight for Every Kid, Amy's research highlights the fact that

low-SES students are more likely to be present-oriented, chiefly a consequence of the 'tunneling' that occurs due to scarcity. Middle-class, higher-SES students, on the other hand, are more inclined to think on the future as they are less burdened by unmet needs in the present. [...] Academically successful students... are those who can imagine fairly far into the future, set goals, and defer gratification in order to work toward them. In this system, our present-oriented students' perspectives are less likely to be acknowledged, honoured, and validated. ...Foresight for Every Kid suggests that educators must first shift their mindsets, tuning in to the time perspective bias in their practices, and adjusting accordingly.

In many respects of course, Syrian girls in a refugee camp in Jordan, on one hand, and low-SES public school children in Canada's largest city, on the other, are incredibly different groups and contexts.

Still, there are at least two key ways in which tracing connections across those differences might be useful.

First, to do so shows how the universally accepted right to education also entails the right to foresight. The chance to envision personally meaningful and motivational long-range outcomes is, at the individual level, a foundation on which the whole enterprise of education ultimately depends.

Since foresight is ultimately about making change in the present, enabling it is not just an "important" priority (aka worthy but perpetually deferrable), but one that needs to be recognised as urgent, too.

Second, it underlines that replacing "victim" with "vision" is really a widespread need, not confined to geopolitical hotspots.

A corollary of this understanding that yes, there is dark to be found everywhere, is the space for hope; the opportunity, in Solnit's words, to make a "commitment to the future [that] makes the present inhabitable".

Herein lies an opportunity for meaningful engagement and contributions from diverse concerned citizens –– educators, futurists, designers, artists, and the rest of us, too –– far and near.

Rama, aged 13. Vision: future doctor. "Walking down the street as a young girl in Syria or Jordan, I encountered many people suffering – sick or injured – and I always wanted to have the power and skills to help them. Now, as a great physician in my community, I have that ability."

Merwa, aged 13. Vision: future painter. "In this image, I am a popular painter, working on a landscape in oils. I have my own gallery where I sell my paintings and sculptures. My hope is that my artwork inspires peace in the world and encourages people to be kind to one another."

Malack, aged 16. Vision: future policewoman. "I’ve always wanted to be a policewoman because the police not only keep people safe, but they also create justice in society. I also work to inspire other young girls to become policewomen – supporting them to dream about their future and thinking about how they will overcome obstacles."

(Big thanks to Vanessa Timmer for the lead!)

Related:
> Foresight is a right
> Ethnographic Experiential Futures
> Wish you were now
> The act of imagination
> Where every day is career day

> Stumbling on foresight

> Second nature
> Apocalypse for one
> Tunisia's national-scale Experiential Scenario

On the money

Image via [pdf].

Today, while browsing one of Melbourne's excellent bookstores -- which are still surprisingly abundant, despite global publishing industry turmoil -- I came across this striking image on the cover of an Australian literary quarterly, Meanjin.

It's from a 02008 photograph series called Oz Omnium Rex et Regina (King and Queen of All Oz) by Darren Siwes, an artist of indigenous Australian and Dutch descent.

A bit of context for international readers:

[The photograph] depicts a recognizably Australian gold coin, close-up. The words "Mary I, Australia 2041" are emblazoned onto its shiny surface. The future reigning monarch bears a distinct resemblance to a local, high-profile Aboriginal woman, leading viewers not only to question Australia’s current (and to many, anachronistic) constitutional monarchy, but also its legal legitimacy. In terms of natural justice, the obvious question arising is, "Why not an Indigenous monarch, or at least, an Indigenous head of state?"

~Christine Nicholls, "A Festival Of The Spirit" [pdf; essay reviewing the 02009 South Australian Living Artists Festival, in which this work also appeared]

Below is the obverse of the one dollar coin now in use, which, like all Australian coins, bears the image of Queen Elizabeth II. Who lives in, um, England.

Image via. [Note that the version of the Queen's head struck in Australian coins
does change periodically, loosely tracking the ageing process.]

Now, as some readers may guess from this blog's usual focus on experiential and performative scenarios, regarding the choice of medium, I personally resonate less with series of gold and silver painted-busker-statue type photos, appearing mainly in art galleries or literary reviews, than I would with an alternative execution of the same idea, in which the coins were physically produced, a tangible and diegetic (in-story) artifact, manifested, integrated and discoverable in everyday contexts, today.

Image via.

In any case, the proposition offered here remains challenging and culturally relevant, and currency proves an especially potent symbolic vector in which to embed it. Like other future artifacts from the same "family" -- e.g. the Amero, or the Aung San Suu Kyi kyat -- this embodies the hypothesis of an epoch-making change of governance in the near future, and it invites us to spend time with the idea for real.

Image via.

"Culture is something that is done to us. Art is something we do to culture."
~Carl Andre *

Related posts:
> The currency of Burmese dissent
> The value of hypothetical currency
> The act of imagination

* Quoted in Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World.

Posthuman cities

...unevenly distributed.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, following an unknown event, mankind disappears from the planet. Nature gradually regains its rights over urban areas, giving birth to a new landscape.
...
At a time when we have become aware of the fragility of nature, and are increasingly concerned about ecology, global warming, and the future of the planet, I wondered how all these man-made super-structures would evolve in time. Angkor is sublimely poetic, overgrown by the forces of nature and evoking a long lost human civilisation….why not Dubai, Shanghai, New York, Rome, Paris next?… What will become of these urban landscapes, these megacities, this civilisation of ours, now possibly at the height of its strength, but one day vowed to disappear, as did the Mayans or the Khmers?

This is by no means a pessimistic end-of-the-world type vision. On the contrary, it is the vision of a world that is quite idyllic, a new-found Garden of Eden, full of life, colours, shapes and poetry, where the freedom and unpredictability of nature has supplanted the hierarchy of angles and organized spaces.

The quote comes from an artist statement by French photographer Chris Morin, introducing his collection of posthuman cityscapes entitled "Once upon a time… tomorrow", which opens next week in a Paris gallery.

This strain of colourful post-collapse imagery (clearly located well after the last-human-gasp sepia of The Road or Children of Men, but with a dash of 12 Monkeys whimsy thanks to the displaced zoo animals) has a soothing, explicitly Edenic quality that by now feels familiar (see Related Posts below).

But I'm never quite sure what to make of it. Is an emerging interest in the delightfulness of posthuman landscapes better read as a sign of adaptation, or one of resignation? Or, perhaps the significance is more in the spectacle of its stabilisation and recuperation as yet another aesthetic genre being bundled off to market. (In case you're tempted, these images, ten of each in giant prints of 1m x 1.5m, are selling at €3000 apiece.)

This ideational territory has seen a fair bit of traffic in recent years, since Alan Weisman's 02007 non-fiction [sic] bestseller The World Without Us, and shortly before that, Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's not clear to me if M. Morin realises that this ground has been covered before -- a google search for the artist's name together with the Weisman book title (in English, and also in its French edition, Homo Disparitus) currently yields zero hits. However, it's curious to see this meme making the rounds, and although most of the international images in this set (such as those below) to me veer well into a sort of new age, post-collapse kitsch, Morin's Parisian visions (see above) seem to have more to say.

Then again, it may be that I'm responding less to a difference of content than to a difference of tactic, the very localisation of images of the future. Certainly I think that, as with imagining impacts of climate change, place- and community-specific appropriation, exploration and concretisation of otherwise abstract futures propositions circulating globally is a key part of what these conversations need in order to move forward.

[Via Rue89. All images and the quote above from Chris Morin's website.]

Related posts:
> Posthuman New York
> Post-apocalypse Tokyo
> The Afterlife of Buildings
> London after the rain
> Not drowning, thriving
> Second Nature
> Climate change for fun and profit
> Mapping c-change
> Oil and water

Artifacts from the present

A few weeks ago, I started working with Chris Baker over at Wired on some upcoming Found features, and it seems to be heightening my filter for sights with an 'artifactual' quality; objects that look and feel like artifacts-from-the-future, that to me are somehow surprising or odd, and seem to say a lot about the time and place we live in.

Photo taken at Walmart checkout, Long Beach, California, 27 February*

A Dunaganian riff: curious how engaging particular media shapes -- even highjacks -- the thought process.

Like when you used to fall asleep, not counting sheep, but arranging tetris shapes behind your eyelids. Or when you catch yourself unintentionally composing tweet-length bon mots about a situation while it's happening. Or when your brain slips silently into photographic mode, composing a shot that captures it all, despite having no camera to hand.

Related posts:
> Future-framing images
> World Without Oil photo essay

*thanks to Maurice Conti, who lent me his iPhone for this shot

The inverted sublime

Watching the DVD of the 02006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes about the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, I was struck by an observation he makes in relation to one particular image...

Edward Burtynsky (01983) Kennecott Copper Mine #22, Bingham Valley, Utah
Image via iCollector

So I decided to do mining as a theme. This particular photograph is Bingham Valley Canyon, just outside of Salt Lake City. My research took me to the largest, I was always looking for the largest mine. What I was hoping to find was something that spoke to scale, that spoke to the fact that we as a species are now dwarfed by our own creation, that the sublime has inverted itself. So, at one point we were kind of fearful of nature -- it's like the Turner with the ship going off to sea in a storm* -- and that nature was the omnipresent fearful force, and the sublime force. What I was trying to do with these images was to say that force has shifted, now we are a force within the planet, or on the planet, and it is our own creations that dwarf us.

~Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes, Stills Gallery with Commentary (DVD extra), 'Manufactured Landscapes' series, commentary to slide #3

Here, the photographer pinpoints, and distils into a symbolically-laden encounter with the unseen fruits of our collective industry, a historic, even mythic, transition point with which we are still, ever so slowly, coming to terms. Did we do that?

Recently we seem to be discovering inconvenient truths everywhere we look, Frankenstein's monsters around every corner.

This evening, when I dug up the link for the Seminar About Long-term Thinking that he did for the Long Now Foundation in July 02008, I noticed that chapter 15 of the video of that seminar was dubbed "Future Responses to Images of Today". The first remark made by Long Now impresario Stewart Brand introducing the post-presentation Q&A session: "It's going to be interesting to see what these images look like in a hundred years' time, a thousand years' time, ten thousand years' time... I have a feeling this kind of imagery -- you're dead right -- is exactly the kind of thing to launch through time."

Coincidentally, I'd been entertaining an almost perfectly symmetrical line of thinking. One of the things I sometimes consider in relation to future artifacts -- Strategic Anachronisms -- is the following thought experiment: If I had to send a time capsule of the present back to the past, say 100 years ago; which objects, images, elements of today might I pick out as most surprising, instructive, evocative, or characteristic of our times? Burtynsky's stuff could well find its way into my capsule selection: I find these images bear a kind of historic weight; they document something profound about What's Going On Here.

That is: we have inverted the sublime, and awaken with awe to the scale and import of what we have wrought. Yet, as terrible as many of the consequences of our industrial transformation have been, this moment of recognition seems to portend the taking of a new level of responsibility commensurate with that power. Or, as Stewart Brand put it in another context: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."

* This may be the Turner painting that Burtynsky had in mind.

The Afterlife of Buildings

Rondo1 (office building, Warsaw, completed 02006)
Photo: Nicolas Grospierre (lower) | Photomontage: Kobas Laksa (upper)

Give your fantasy free rein. After all, we know that nothing lasts forever. Everything is changing. The world is in a constant rush. Architecture will also be subject to modification. Each of the six grand edifices will have to surrender to the passage of time. ... These visions of the future are likely, though one can imagine alternative ones as well.
...
Isn't it strange that, although we all sense the inconstancy of the world and hear an increasingly persistent ticking of the clock, architecture pretends not to be concerned?

~The Afterlife of Buildings website / Welcome

The Polish Pavilion at the 11th Architecture Exhibition, now on in Venice, features a show called The Afterlife of Buildings. Six prominent structures erected in Poland over the last decade have been photographed by Nicolas Grospierre and then destroyed through the photomontage skills of Kobas Laksa.

What the curators appear to think of as brilliantly novel has to this future-watcher the air of faddish me-tooism. Artful photoillustrations of cityscapes falling into disrepair, however competently executed, have become a well-worn genre in their own right (there having been already a rash of them this year; see Related Posts below). There are in a couple of these images a glimmer of something more interesting -- a practice of architectural visualisation which specialises not in designing from scratch, but in ingenious repurposing (sort of a forward-looking counterpart to Stewart Brand's 01994 book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built). Indeed, to visualise one or two buildings' alternative futures -- evolving in several different ways, systematically adapting and branching off in different scenario directions -- would have been a much more interesting effort, in my view, than this series of contemporary buildings all trudging more or less the same downward spiral in parallel.

So the singular (supposedly "likely") scenario offered here, despite the creators' claim of being able to imagine "other ones", which comes off as idle, instead does both its creators and its audience a disservice, accomplishing something close to -- but fortunately not quite, with the waterslides and airport terminal-turned-farm -- another entry in our self-indulgent, early 21st-century collective catalogue of collapse.

The Metropolitan (office building, Warsaw)

Marina Mokotów (gated housing estate, Warsaw)

Warsaw University Library

Sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows (Licheń)

Terminal 2 (Fryderyk Chopin international airport, Warsaw)

[Photos by Nicolas Grospierre and photomontages by Kobas Laksa, all images via exhibition website]

Related posts:
> Post-apocalypse Tokyo
> Not drowning, thriving
> Posthuman New York
> Immaculate extinction
> London after the rain

(Thanks Bryan!)

Another found future artifact (England)

Excellent.


This photo, apparently of a tribute by English Heritage to time traveller Jacob von Hogflume, has been leading a life of its own for the last couple of years online (google "Hogflume") -- including, it seems, a brief career at Wikipedia.

Turns out to be from a book called Signs of Life by advertising men Dave Askwith and Alex Normanton (more examples via BBC News).

From an article in The Times profiling the duo:

Normanton, a graphic designer, found the correct fonts and mounted the signs on card and paper. Askwith then photographed them in their natural geographical habitat. He likens it to the guerrilla, subversive interventions of the graffiti artist Banksy.
[...]
Sometimes, especially on the train, he left the signs up and sat waiting for a fellow passenger to register them. "They'd sit there, stare into space, then look at the sign and it didn't say what they expected it to say, and they'd look confused as if to say, 'Hang on, what's going on here'."

~Tim Teeman, "Time of the signs", The Times (London), 21 December 02005.

Normanton adds: "If our joke signs didn’t actually look real, people wouldn’t take notice, wouldn’t get the joke."

It seems the increased likelihood of not noticing the joke, because of the signs' verisimilitude, is also what makes them work. Hmm.

Facing future

Arrested Development is one of the great, and way underrated, television comedies. Written, acted and edited to whip-smart perfection; if you like dark, surreal humour about family dysfunction you owe it to yourself to get familiar. I've just finished watching the first season again, which includes a typically bizarre exchange between Michael (Jason Bateman) and his twin sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) about one of Lindsay's doomed business ventures, "Mommy, What Will I Look Like?" (Bluthcyclopedia link).

Michael: Lindsay, I'm not just going to cut you a check so you can throw it away on another failed business, okay?

Lindsay: Hey! "Mommy, What Will I Look Like?" should have worked.

Narrator: Lindsay had once started a photo enhancing service, which gave new parents a glimpse at what their infants would look like in half a century.

Lindsay: You put an ugly kid in, you can't be surprised when an ugly adult comes out.





(Stills captured from Arrested Development, Season 1 Episode 22, "Let 'em Eat Cake")

In the same vein, and also scary as hell, I found a project called "Face of the Future" run by the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. You can upload photos and use the "Face Transformer", "Face Averager", or "Face Morpher" to manipulate them.

Here's me, shall we say, when I'm 64...


I'm not so sure about the full head of hair, but whatever shortcomings this has in terms of realism, it's still a bit unnerving to recognise the likeness in an image thus transformed.

No wonder "Mommy, What Will I look Like?" tanked.

Another World Without Oil photo essay (sort of)

As prices at the petrol pumps climb to record highs in Hawaii, and elsewhere, tongue-in-cheek images from a future "If gas prices continue to rise" are making the rounds...






It's interesting to see this issue handled humorously. Not that these are uproariously funny, but they certainly contrast in tone with the sombre harbingers of post-gas culture seen in the (unphotoshopped) series of images posted here a few months ago. I'm also reminded of World Without Oil writer Ken Eklund's comment to that photo essay: "the future objects that hit me in the gut are the repurposed ones: The Hummer car dealership that's now a refugee camp, the gutted Honda that now uses its alternator as a windmill..." Here, the improvised product life-extensions represented by the sail-car, and the vehicles pulled by horses and dogs, come across as a sort of satirical variation on that repurposing strategy.

(Christine Hansen sent these to the HRCFS listserv two days ago, and although plenty of blogs featured these in April and May [example], I haven't found an original source.)

It's a small world, after all

Literally.

To these recent posts about envisaging end-of-the-world ("after all") type scenarios, we can add the work of Lori Nix, who makes miniature dioramas of grim, sometimes amusing scenes, and takes pictures of them. It's The World Without Us, writ small...

Photo: Lori Nix, Vacuum Showroom [The City], 02006

Photo: Lori Nix [For "The Catastrophist View", New York Magazine, 28 October 02007]

Photo: Lori Nix [Featured at Wired, 21 April 02008]

Photo: Lori Nix, Natural History [The City] 02005

Photo: Lori Nix, Great Hall [The City] 02006

Blockbuster special effects a lá Day After Tomorrow are awesome — even that silly ice-encased Statue of Liberty — but you don't need $100 million to plausibly depict post-apocalyptic ruin. Case in point: the unsettling dioramas photographer Lori Nix constructs out of materials like wood, buckwheat flour, insulation foam, and acrylic gel. In her series The City, she imagines abandoned municipal settings where nature is taking its ineluctable revenge.
[...]
As a photographer, Nix has very traditional methods; none of her work is done digitally, and she even prints her own photos in a color lab.

~Asami Novak, "Nature Conquers Micropolis in Dioramas Photographed to Look Real", Wired, 21 April 02008.

Part of an interview with Lori Nix by Jonah Samson, in Cool Hunting, 11 May 02007:

Q: The newer stuff seems to have less obvious humor than the earlier work and some of the scenes, even though they are incredibly beautiful, are also feel very "it's the end of the world." Can you talk about that progression?

A: There are still humorous things, but they're more tucked away. It's not quite so obvious. I started the whole model thing while I was living in Ohio, and then I transplanted myself to New York eight years ago. I'm getting older and life is getting harder. I think I have less of a carefree spirit. I have worry about bigger things, like bills and money. I think my whole nature is turning a little darker, just from living in an urban environment. I also think that I’m getting more mature in my work and taking bigger risks—wanting to do more grand–scale scenes. I think that if I transplanted myself back to the Midwest, the scenes would become more simplistic again, because I really feed off of my environment. I think just being in the city, I'm more interested in architecture and I'm seeing it everywhere I turn.

Finally, a word or two from the artist's website:

Lori Nix is an artist who bends the line between truth and illusion in her photographs. She accomplishes this by photographing miniatures and models which illuminate her interest in the disaster movies of the 1970s and her memories of growing up in Kansas—a place that seems to attract disasters like no other.
[...]
In her most recent work, Nix has left Kansas behind as a subject, and, although depictions of disaster are still prominent in this new work, she has begun to explore situations that are as eerie and ominous as her former work was clear and present. This new work is charged with anxiety and uncertainty as witnesses to her previous disasters have become bystanders waiting for something to happen.

~Jeffrey Hoone, Director, Light Work

I much prefer the decay of intimate, mundane stuff that we're not used to associating with apocalypse (the top two of the images above are my favourites in this line). Somehow, portrayals of crumbling public buildings of the library-and-museum genre seem a bit obvious.

Nix's other work, while not set in a grandly posthuman future, is imbued with a similar melancholy. It's great stuff, in a surprisingly eloquent medium.

Photo: Lori Nix, Three Figures [Some Other Place]

Photo: Lori Nix [Featured at Cool Hunting, 11 May 02007]

World without oil photo essay (part three)

I-55 and Route 61, near Holland, Missouri.
31 December 020XX.











(Thanks to Natron for doing the driving that day. Let the record show that you powered through that Memphis hangover like a champ.)

[Back to part one | part two]