Sing Sing 1992

This photograph, Sing Sing, comes from the mind and lens of James Casebere, a contemporary artist born in 1953. Here we have a building bathed in cool, clinical light, a stark white against an infinite black backdrop. It's so pristine, almost like a child's toy made from cardboard, an uncanny dollhouse without the dolls. I imagine Casebere carefully constructing this scene, a model built in his studio, layer by layer. The light almost has a physical presence, doesn't it? The high contrast emphasizes the geometry of the architecture, those rows of punched-out windows like a haunting rhythm. It reminds me of the work of other contemporary photographers like Thomas Demand. He also builds and photographs paper models. Perhaps Casebere was thinking about the history of architectural photography, the way it can both document and distort reality. It's almost as if Casebere is posing a question: what does it mean to represent a place like Sing Sing, so loaded with history and emotion, as a miniature, a fiction? Ultimately, artists use whatever form of expression to make new meanings, and open up space for ambiguity and uncertainty, to allow multiple interpretations.