Empty streets of major cities, evacuated airports, and boarded-up storefronts: the COVID-19 pandemic has produced an archive of end-times imagery conjuring a world evacuated of human meddling, allowing us to envision, more readily, what the end of humanity might look like. Despite the threat of global environmental collapse and the rise of autocratic governments that have darkened the horizon for some time, many of us, whose daily lives unfolded in a relatively secure world, have only lately come to realize that what we assumed to be stable and normal is neither. Precarious is our moment and, most likely, our future as well.

Apocalyptic visions have haunted individuals and cultures for millennia. Romantic poets and painters of early 19th century, Caspar David Friedrich and Percy Shelley for example, created works pondering humanity’s end. Friedrich painted dramatic landscapes, often with diminutive figures contemplating the enormity of God’s creation. By evoking fragments of a great civilization now buried in desert sand, Shelley’s 1818 sonnet, Ozymandias, quietly mocked the hubris and futility of human efforts towards the eternal. 

Representations of the future tend toward the bleak. One reason might be that promises of death and destruction are potent weapons of social control. And for some reason it is easier, or more fun maybe, to imagine the varieties of horror that awaits humankind, than to imagine the bucolic fields of some future paradise. Whether inspired by religious fervor, political nihilism or simply idle reverie, belief that the end of the world is imminent has inspired artists to imagine how it will happen. Will it be four horsemen or the fire next time? What will the aftermath look like? Will it be total devastation resulting in an uninhabitable planet? Or will humanity fade slowly away leaving its creations behind to be reclaimed by nature? Will the end times be redemptive or dystopian? Will it be an act of God, alien invasion, or human stupidity?

For 20 years, the collaborative team of Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber have been imagining humanity’s minor and major disasters in miniature. Their early work, Accidentally Kansas, completed in the early 2000s, presents dreamy, colorful, somewhat soft-focused instances of quotidian trouble—table-top disasters featuring flooded neighborhoods, snow-bound highways, and tipped-over chicken trucks. While some of these early images evoke pathos, particularly a car sinking below thin ice into deep dark water after swerving to avoid deer on the road; the prevailing sentiment is humorous and playful, sweet-natured edged in shadow.

In their more recent series, The City and Empire, Nix and Gerber’s imagery manifests a more epic approach. Whereas the disasters of Accidentally Kansas were localized, in these bodies of work the implied catastrophes suggest a finality. Architecture is essential and specific, realism replaces the fanciful, sharp-focus instead of shallow depth of field, the palette is more realistic and less reassuring—this is aftermath after an unnamed cataclysm, and as a central motif, disintegration replaces disaster. The images in The City are the ruinous interiors of modern life—classrooms, subway cars, libraries, laundromats, aquariums, casinos, and restaurants. None of the images are occupied by human bodies, yet we comprehend the scale of the structures because we ourselves have visited such places. In this manner, the pathos deepens; the abandoned classroom, for example, is covered in a gritty gray dust, a large illustration of the human eye hangs askew, mounted models of body parts fill cabinets, skulls and specimens in glass jars line the shelves. These representations, these remnants of human biology are apparently all that is left of the beings that built this world. 

Empire imagines the exterior scenes of devastation and nature’s unyielding process of reclamation. The natural world is as relentless as it is remorseless; the creeping vegetation cares not if it is assaulting a neo-classical triumphal arch in a metropolis or is taking over a series of highway overpasses—it makes no distinction among the works of humanity. In one image, a lemonade stand and an abandoned lawn mower, both frosted with a thin coat of snow, share their lonely corner of the world like a humble graveyard of the mundane. While the edifices and spaces in The City and Empire may not compete with the grandeur of ancient ruins such as the pyramids of Giza or Teotihuacan, the temples at Angkor Wat, or the Roman Coliseum, Nix and Gerber’s scenarios are no less symbols of a great, if lost, civilization. 

Despite the suggestion that humanity’s story has reached its conclusion, there are moments of hopefulness in Empire. In the sublime image “Dawn,” for example, decaying skyscrapers have been transformed into monumental pots for the flora that sprouts from rooftops and windows. The avenues between buildings are now valleys full of exuberant foliage. In the distance, a pale sun rises between skeletal apartment buildings while a flock of birds gathers in the weak light. 

For this viewer, there are two prevailing reactions to the work of Nix and Gerber. First is the admiration and delight at the craft and attention to detail required to create these dioramas, that exist essentially, only to be photographed. The second reaction is rooted in the limits of photographic narrative—the images do not address the question of “what happened?” We do not know if these ruins are the result of a single catastrophe or a series of failures. Are these structures localized, occupying one city or country, or is it a global phenomenon? Are all the humans gone? Where are their remains? The images are mute on these matters. We view the photographs as a series of stages after the play is over. The scenes are charged by a violence we cannot name and haunted by actors whose fates are unclear. It appears as if humankind has vanished; we are after-the-fact witnesses who must construct a story out of fragments—detectives trying to solve our own disappearance. 

This article first appeared in Issue 15, The Fiction Issue.