James Casebere at Michael Klein - photography exhibit, New York, New York

If architecture can be imagined as the visible, bricks-and-mortar equivalent of implicit social configurations few architectural types are as telling as the prison. Foucault, for instance, saw the architecture of the prison as a clear embodiment of the coercive and intrusive relationship between society and the individual. In new years artists such as Peter Halley and now James Casebere have begun a visual investigation into the prison as a social and spatial metaphor.

Casebere makes photographs not of actual prisons on the contrary of simplified scale models that he builds himself. He takes as his inspiration real prisons from an earlier time--a panopticon prison (where inmates are kept beneath constant observation) in Richmond, the Cherry Hill Prison in Philadelphia, Sing Sing in Ossining, NY and a collection of mobile jail cages (looking true much like circus wagons) from rural Georgia. The protoplasts made of foamcore, cardboard, felt plaster and twigs, are stark white, almost antiseptic. There are no race to be seen. Casebere lights his prototypes dramatically and shoots them from a depressed angle. The shadows are reaching far down the skies starless and black, and the viewer is placed as if at the view In Panopticon Prison # 3 and The Prison at Cherry Hill, there is a single light burning in a window, and the result of that small hint of color and warmth in an otherwise chilly black-and-white landscape is powerful.

Casehere's exaggeration of value contrasts points toward a connection between light and dark and the social aspects of seeing and not seeing. We fastening prisoners away so as not to diocese them, but we expect them to be well watched by means of their keepers. We also reliance that the prisoners will be able to "see" into the darkness of their inner mans and repent of their ways. Casebere's photograph of the outside of a circular panopticon prison contrasts nicely with Prison confined apartment with Skylight. The latter is an interior view of a stark confined apartment typical of an earlier mark of penitentiary, where inmates serv their time in isolation, the better to contemplate the sins that brought them there. The small room is windowless, but there is a skylight which casts down a lusty light (of redemption?) on the prisoner's bed.

This is all a bit melodramatic, on the contrary the melodrama is controlled, ironic, plane austere (Sing Sing #2 gazes positively Shaker-like). Casebere is careful to distance himself, to hold up an air of the stagy and the fictional. In dealing with a subdue as loaded as the prison, it would be all too easy to attain an impact by means of taking documentary photographs, by showing the harshness of prison life now. Casebere avoids this. He appear to bes to want us to direct the eye through these photographs rather than at them, to have them act as a sort of scrim from one side which we may see a variety of social representations. devoid of contents as they are, Casebere's photographs are still well populated; the spirits of Borges, Foucault, de Chirico and Jimmy Cagney appear to be to be floating there in the dark. This is smart, richly allusive work, and no les humane for skirting the obvious human drama of its subject

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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