Hospital

James Casebere

1997 · Silver dye bleach print · Photographs

Since the mid-1970s Casebere has been photographing tabletop models that he constructs out plaster, Styrofoam, and cardboard. While his earlier images highlighted the flimsy, house-of-cards aspect of his creations, his photographs of the 1990s hover more ambiguously between the real and the imagined. The deserted, white-washed spaces he fabricates-prisons, schools, courtrooms, underground tunnels, corridors, and sewers-seem uncannily familiar and often call to mind unsettling associations with discipline, circulation, and control. Stripped of incidental detail, this dramatically lit view of hospital beds has a generic institutional quality that is also strangely haunting, like a half-remembered dream.

Artist

James Casebere

Date

1997

Medium

Silver dye bleach print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Neil C.S. Hirsch, 2001