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Spencer Lowell’s first monograph, Futures Past, brings together photographs of people, technology, industry and the environment without arguing that technology is either a threat to nature or its cure. Its images move from a robotic priest and automated dairy equipment to spaceflight, nuclear infrastructure and microplastics, showing human-made systems as part of the settings in which biological life unfolds.
What is Spencer Lowell’s Futures Past about?
Futures Past gathers photographs Lowell made over more than two decades. The Los Angeles-born photographer, now based in New York City, describes his practice as photography of “science, technology, industry, environment, and people,” according to PetaPixel’s October 2, 2026 profile. The book puts those subjects in relation rather than treating technology as an isolated category.
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Spencer Lowell: Futures Past | $75.00 | Buy on Amazon |
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That relationship can be intimate, as with a machine involved in milking cows or a robot taking on the role of a priest. It can also expand to the scale of a facility, city, or planet: the images include space-communication testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the launch of the Mars Rover Curiosity, and the Space Shuttle Endeavour being moved through Los Angeles. Other subjects include molten-gold refining in Nevada, a reactor door at Fukushima Daiichi, microplastics from the Mediterranean, and an experimental fire-tornado laboratory in Montana.
The resulting range is part of what makes the encounters occasionally bizarre. Familiar human settings and purposes—work, worship, research, transport—meet systems and machines that can seem strange, monumental, or indifferent to the people around them. The examples are not evidence of one unified policy argument; they give the book a varied set of ways to look at technology’s place in lived and natural environments.
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How does Lowell frame the relationship between humans and technology?
Lowell says technology does not simply stand in opposition to nature, but continues it. He points to Mindar, a robotic priest in Kyoto, as an example of technology speaking to a human experience. That is his interpretation of the work, not a scientific claim about what technology is or will become.
In PetaPixel’s report, Lowell says: “This work does not propose conclusions. It documents a condition in which biological life and technological systems are no longer separable, yet remain unevenly aligned,” (PetaPixel, October 2, 2026). The distinction matters: the photographs invite attention to the overlap without prescribing a verdict for or against technological change.
Writer Daniel Sherrell, who contributed the opening essay, offers a more unsettling reading. He writes that “There are people in these photos, but rarely are there individuals. The technologies are the real individuals, protagonists of their own cryptic story,” and says the photographs capture worlds “that both serve and exclude us” (PetaPixel, October 2, 2026). His language emphasizes how systems can appear to have their own scale and logic. It is one interpretive lens on the images, alongside Lowell’s deliberately open-ended approach.
What is in the book, and how is it published?
The official KGP Monolith listing for Futures Past specifies a 2026 hardcover measuring 10 × 13.5 inches, with 96 pages and 57 plates. It says the first edition is limited to 750 copies and that the book is printed in Italy.
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- Author: Kinkade, Thomas.Spencer, Katherine.
- Publisher: Berkley
- Pages: 272
- Publication Date: 2008
- Edition: Reprint
| Publisher-listed option | Listed price |
|---|---|
| Book only | $75 |
| Book with one signed, limited 11 × 14-inch archival pigment print | $250 |
| Book with all four signed prints | $1,000 |
These are the prices shown on the publisher’s 2026 listing; prices and availability can change. The listing stated that preorder shipping was expected in October 2026, so check the page for current order and shipping details.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Who is Spencer Lowell?
Lowell has worked as a photographer for more than 20 years. PetaPixel reports that his clients have included Apple, Bloomberg, National Geographic, Google, Meta, NASA, OpenAI, and TIME. His official portfolio groups recent work under subjects such as Robots, Technology, Science, Industry, Spaces, and Sapiens, with captions identifying locations and subjects including Mindar in Kyoto and a quantum computing system in Troy, New York.
Those portfolio categories and the book’s examples help orient readers to the breadth of his practice, but they do not amount to a formal taxonomy or a single thesis. The photographs range across human participation, the scale of the system, and whether a scene involves production, testing, transport, ritual, or environmental material.
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