James Casebere - Works 1975-2010

James Casebere (born 1953) emerged in the Pictures Generation (1974-84) as an artist-photographer who, alongside Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, complicated the status of the photographic image. 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 masterfully 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 during the 17th and 18th centuries-particularly prisons. The lighting in his photographs is dramatic, or rather it plays with the rhetoric of dramatic lighting, qualified by the sheer artifice f the architectural models themselves. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, this major midcareer survey includes several of Casebere's lesser-known early works, as well as a number of sculptures and photographs from 1975 to 2011 that have, until now, remained unpublished. Enwezor contrebutes a conversation with the artist, while the book opens with a foreword by Toni Morrison and Ford Morrison, and includes an insightful essay by Hal Foster. James Casebere : Works 1975-2010 is the most comprehensive monograph to date on this important American artist.