Common everyday settings are reimagined as post-mankind worlds in a miniature series that aims to show what the city would look like after man has gone. The miniatures dioramas are constructed by Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber who have been working together for 14 years creating real life masterpieces.

While many of the photos taken of the miniatures may seem to be the work of Photoshop fiction, National Geographic’s short documentary by The Drawing Room shows the actual attention and practical time spent to working on each photograph.

Abandoned buildings and crumbling tube stations are manufactured into life with painstaking detail in The City, a photo series that makes use of Nix + Gerbers craftsmanship as miniature sculpters. With each diorama taking approximately seven months to build, the duo has enough time to flesh out the tiniest intricacies, such as individual CD covers and books lining the inside of a homely shelf.

The theme for these dioramas is fancifully in post-apocalyptic settings, with the team asking themselves what the world would be like if mankind was somehow decimated and civilisation was left to wither away.

For each diorama Nix + Gerber will set out to faithfully recreate a building in a miniature scale before aging the world into a dilapidated and crumbling dystopia that has succumb to the force of Mother Nature.

While brilliant in its own right, it’s not the dioramas that grace the halls of art museums but the photographs that Nix takes of it. Even though she spends more time working with her hands, Nix regards herself as a photographer above anything else because she knows how to make the camera lie.

Nix gets behind her large format film camera three times a year to shoot the model scenes for her portfolio. Afterwards, the dioramas are stripped for future miniature props and everything else is discarded as trash. “I love throwing my scenes away,” Nix admits “because it means I’m ready to start the next scene. ”

2016-10-11 03:00