JAMES CASEBERE
WELCOME to Dutchess County, New York. The streets are clean, the lawns neat, and the crime rate is zero. Move here and you’d remain entirely untroubled by undesirable people or experiences. But there’s a snag. This bit of suburban real estate is a tabletop model crafted from paper and plastic in the studio of artist James Casebere. You could trample all over it in a Godzilla costume, but you couldn’t live in it.
Casebere is one of the Pictures Generation, artists who arrived in the 1970s, intending to unsettle the conventions of photography by making those conventions part of their subject matter. For the past five decades, he has been reproducing small sections of the world as scaled-down architectural models. When photographed, they expose the ideas upon which the built environment is founded. Our homes, for example, the ones we work to pay for: They may be no more secure than Casebere’s paper town. What use are solar panels or mortgages when, in the next valley, a fire is burning?