(that’s me!) is a London-based photographer and writer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I explore nature in the human landscape, and what the world might look like when we are gone.

I graduated from Falmouth University in 2022 with a degree in Marine and Natural History Photography.

See my recent photography or a recent story.

Contact me at duncanpetrie1@gmail.com
or on Instagram @probablyduncan.

In 1989, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that humanity had reached the “End of History”. The Cold War was over. Western liberal democracy had prevailed. He lamented the loss of ideological struggle, and the looming monotony of this post-historic era. But there is another kind of End to History.

Palimpsest (2023-ongoing) is a photographic project that explores this posthistoric landscape. If we all vanished tomorrow, what would remain?

Returning to photography after a year-long hiatus, I struggled to match the quality of my old work. My new images were weak. They lacked dynamism, punctum, decisive moments. No birds filled their skies.

To Pigeon-Fill the Sky (2024) is a photographic storybook about birds, the creative process, and AI art.

Gradually, we grew out of our past, explained away halos and beasts and cities of clouds. But it’s still there, that old world. Like a first coat of paint, glinting out through chips and scratches.

Lingermyth (2022) is an artist book of 50 images created as a final degree project for Marine & Natural History Photography at Falmouth University.

The wide blue sea spread before me, a quilt of the patterns of the wind. I was suddenly struck by profound desire. A desire for what, I was not sure.

I was on the edge of the world, and I wanted to see beyond. It was a sort of nostalgia, but not for any real past. A nostalgia for the future, maybe, the future that can no longer be.

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about this feeling. If you’re interested in the theories behind my photographic practice, check it out.

The full breadth of humanity, every hope and every sorrow, every song and every sigh, is on Wikimedia Commons, an open file repository maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation.

In Spring of 2021, I created this film, for free, using 144 of those files.

For years I struggled to photograph water; my photos were much too busy, seeing everything while capturing nothing.

Now, I distill the water into its simplest form, making abstract what is too big to capture conventionally.