James Casebere

James Casebere (born 1953) emerged in the Pictures Generation as an artist-photographer complicating the status of the photographic image alongside Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. His earliest works dismantled the codes of American suburbia and the myth of the west, but he quickly arrived at the practice for which he is best known today: the construction of formally simplified architectural models--arenas, monasteries, tunnels, factories--which Casebere lights and photographs in his studio. In the early 1990s, as the ramifications of Michel Foucault's critiques of architecture and power took hold in American culture, Casebere's practice developed into a study of architectural typologies of the Enlightenment era, particularly prisons. The lighting in his photographs is dramatic, or rather it plays with the rhetoric of dramatic lighting, qualified by the sheer artifice of the architectural models themselves. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, this major mid-career survey includes several of Casebere's lesser-known early works, as well as previously unreproduced sculpture and photographs from 1975 to 2010. Enwezor contributes both an introduction and a conversation with the artist. The volume also contains essays by Hal Foster and Toni Morrison. James Casebere: Works 1975-2010 is the most comprehensive monograph to date on this important American artist.

For the last 20 years, James Casebere has constructed increasingly complex small-scale architectural models that are carefully built and then subtly lit and photographed in the studio. These table-sized models are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms, empty of both extraneous detail and action. Casebere's disconcerting ''sites'' recall prisons, monasteries, tunnels, factories and other such spaces. Casebere has gained increasing international acclaim in recent years as the leading proponent of what has become known as ''constructed photography.'' This is the first publication to comprehensively survey Casebere's career in its entirety, and provides an important contextual and visual framework in which to posit his soaring international reputation. His oeuvre can be seen in the full scope of its development, from his early preoccupation with the genre of the Western and the suburban home, to his concern with institutional buildings, to his recent investigations into the relationships between social control and social structures.