Lori Nix takes photography to new heights… or is that its most intricate depths? Her photography isn’t that of majestic landscapes and windswept natural wonders, but rather captures whole  narratives she constructs through miniature dioramas. Her most recent work, The City, is a series where she constructs a world that has long since self-destructed, only to be portrayed as a  camera flash view of the post-apocalypse. In this series, the upturned rooms and toppled laundromats that are representative of a wrecked humanity feel like the sets of a big sci-fi flick — both ominous and whimsical — told in little freeze frames. What if the world were ruined, shrunk to size and, only then, captured on film?

For Nix, photography isn’t the act of stealing the natives’ souls or commemorating fleeting actions, but rather of constructing entire imaginary “what if” worlds where the photograph is its surviving and ultimate evidence. When speaking of her process, Lori explains that, “It takes about seven months to build a scene and two to three weeks to shoot the final image.” Seven months, to create, destroy, and then photograph a world. Her past and equally intriguing projects include the barren scapes  of Accidentally Kansas and quirky realm of Unnatural Wonders, just to name a few. Sure there’s capturing detail, but this is ridiculous; Lori Nix does it delicately, thoughtfully and with a set of tweezers.