Perhaps the best way to truly imagine what the apocalypse will be like is to turn it on yourself, and picture how time would ravage the very room that you’re standing in. This is exactly what partners and artistic collaborators Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber did during the photography series The City, which imagines a post-apocalyptic world where humans are extinct and nature has taken over what they built.
Nix and Gerber both create the miniature models, which Nix then uses as the subject of her photography. After creating many post-apocalyptic images as part of The City—including what’s left of a subway car, a bar, a library, an aquarium, and more—Nix and Gerber imagined what their own studio would look like after the end of the human race. The result was the 2013 photograph Living Room.
In this short documentary, Robert Hall and Nol Honig of the Drawing Room captured Nix and Gerber’s process while they worked on this very close-to-home installment of The City. The duo created a post-apocalyptic version of the studio they share in their Brooklyn apartment, where their tiny models are created and photographed. So unlike the other photographs in the series, this one is based on a real room, and one that Nix and Gerber know well. This adds the challenge of copying what they see around them to the already arduous process of creating a miniature diorama.
Hall and Honig told Slate they “both love optical trickery and that uncanny feeling when you aren’t sure if what you are looking at is real or artificial.” To that end, they brought on colorist Phil Choe to color correct the film. Hall and Honig explained that Choe brought “a slightly artificial, over-the-top color quality to the footage” that helped achieve the same is-it-real-or-fake quality found in Nix and Gerber’s work.
