ticketsMember | Make a donation

Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1

2009
Not on view
Casebere, originally an architecture student, is part of the disillusioned, skeptical generation that came of age in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, and in his art he uses the assumed truthfulness of photography against itself to question how we are acculturated through images. Beginning in the mid-1970s the artist made dramatically lit black-and-white photographs of three-dimensional tabletop sculptures that he constructed of plaster, Styrofoam, and cardboard. His early subjects comprised a ghost world of instantly recognizable, yet eerily indistinct, social spaces—from courtrooms and libraries to an empty storefront or a suburban street at night. In the 1990s he shifted to color and enlarged the scale of his works; his subjects ranged from hospitals and jails to tunnels, corridors, and flooded rooms that called to mind unsettling associations with discipline, circulation, and control.

This majestic work is made from a model of a suburban subdivision (of the kind recently decimated by the foreclosure crisis) that took the artist a year and a half to complete. Its dewy sunniness, however, is deceptive and unnerving: with computer graphics, Pixar, and CGI, the world may have caught up to and surpassed Casebere's analogue sleight-of-hand, but the isolation bred by both a fatal attraction to illusion and the competitive consumption of "keeping up with the Joneses" continues to erode our collective potential and happiness.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1
  • Artist: James Casebere (American, born 1953)
  • Date: 2009
  • Medium: Chromogenic print
  • Dimensions: Frame: 188.3 x 265.7 cm (74 1/8 x 104 5/8 x 3 in.)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2011
  • Object Number: 2011.39
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

More Artwork

More Artwork
A slider containing 5 items.
Press the down key to skip to the last item.
Hospital, James Casebere American, Silver dye bleach print
Hospital
James Casebere
1997
Library I
James Casebere
1980
Dormitory
James Casebere
Jean-Yves Noblet Contemporary Prints
2007
After Sinan
James Casebere
Jean-Yves Noblet Contemporary Prints
2007
Arches, James Casebere American, Gelatin silver print
Arches
James Casebere
1985

Related Content

Timeline of Art History

Entries from The Met's art encyclopedia.

Publications

Books, guides, and catalogues published by The Met.

Research Resources

The Met provides unparalleled resources for research and welcomes an international community of students and scholars. The Met's Open Access API is where creators and researchers can connect to the The Met collection. Open Access data and public domain images are available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee.

To request images under copyright and other restrictions, please use this Image Request form.

Feedback

We continue to research and examine historical and cultural context for objects in The Met collection. If you have comments or questions about this object record, please complete and submit this form. The Museum looks forward to receiving your comments.