Photographer Spencer Lowell’s first monograph, Futures Past, delivers 57 color images across nearly 100 pages, each unified by its visual investigation of technological progress and how technology intersects with humanity.

The subject matter ranges from aerial shots of New York City to a close-up of an automated cow milking machine. There’s a fire tornado inside a lab in Montana, a crazy-looking auditory testing room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and a person bowing to a humanoid, robotic priest in Kyoto, Japan. Nuclear reactors, Mars rovers, pleasure robots, and supercomputers appear throughout.

Lowell describes himself as a photographer of “science, technology, industry, environment, and people,” and all of that is shown throughout his debut monograph. The Los Angeles-born, New York City-based photographer has worked with huge names over the years. He’s worked with Apple, Bloomberg, National Geographic, Google, Meta, NASA, OpenAI, TIME, and many more.

Lowell has been a working photographer for over 20 years, and he says Futures Past is a definitive collection of his “finest images” so far.

“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,” Lowell says.

Futures Past includes an opening essay from climate activist and Fulbright Award-winning writer, Daniel Sherrell.

“There are people in these photos, but rarely are there individuals. The technologies are the real individuals, protagonists of their own cryptic story,” Sherrell says. “The photographs capture them on their own terms, in the worlds that they’ve built — worlds that both serve and exclude us.”

Sherrell adds that Lowell’s photos approach the subject “in thrall to their alien beauty.”

While many of Lowell’s subjects showcase technologies that have not pervaded everyday life for most people, Sherrell thinks many of the subjects and concepts on display are inevitable.

Lowell says the technology he has photographed for over two decades around the world does not stand in opposition to nature, but rather continues it. While a robotic priest may seem entirely out of this world, for example, it is clearly not, and speaks to a very human experience.

Futures Past ships this month and is published by KGP Monolith. The standard edition is $75, although special edition copies with limited-edition prints are available for $250 each. There’s also an option to get the book with four signed prints for $1,000. All versions can be preordered now.

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Image credits© Spencer Lowell. All photos from ‘Futures Past,’ designed by Luminosity Lab and published by KGP Monolith.