For his first exhibition in Brussels, American photographer James Casebere is showing his latest and previously unseen work at Galerie Templon. The new work draws its inspiration from climate change and the threat of environmental disasters.

His colour photographs depict American landscapes, those vast spaces where land, forest and sea meet in places such as the Californian coast and North Carolina. Isolated architectural structures stand in the midst of these places where nature reigns apparently unchallenged. Sometimes private dwellings, sometimes public buildings, they are the stamp of human activity and the symbol of its fragility.
While giving full rein to his response to the vastness of these natural surroundings, James Casebere continues his examination of the home as the utopian symbol of contemporary American society. 

James Casebere’s photographs are the fruit of a painstaking working process in the studio that starts with devising the models and ends with a highly complex lighting design. By asking us to consider a world made of scale models, Casebere shines a light on the vulnerability of the grandiose spectacles that nature offers and of the current model for economic growth.

Rooted in his love of architecture, and nourished by cinematographic sources, James Casebere’s pioneering work has, for the past twenty-five years, placed him at the forefront of artists working with staged photography whose other prominent exponents include Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. Casebere works with the ambiguity of photography and human geography to create a politically inspired body of work. In 2005, his work looked at relationships between Western and Eastern worlds. In 2008, his focus was on America’s secret military prisons. The 2010 series, Landscape with Houses, took America’s subprime crisis as its subject.

Born in 1953, James Casebere lives and works in New York. He work featured in The Pictures Generation exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2009, as well as in Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and at the Whitney Biennial in New York, both also in 2009. His work can be seen in many major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Modern in London. A comprehensive monograph on James Casebere was published by Damiani in 2011, with essays by Okwui Enwezor, Hal Foster and Toni Morrison.

*image (left)
© James Casebere
courtesy of the artist and Galerie Daniel Templon