Martin Markcrow (MM): Are your images sketched out initially with pencil and paper, in rough scale models, or derived from actual buildings or spaces?

James Casebere (JC): All three. Sometimes I work from small black and white photos of existing structures. I might embellish the image, modifying, or radically transforming it in the model making process. I also might add sections, alter details, surfaces, proportions, and otherwise simplify or enlarge. In other cases, I might start from scratch or from other images of my own.

MM: In contrast to an architects’ model, which is often used as a tool to assess the quality of a space and form (viewed both externally and internally) before it is constructed at full scale for actual inhabitation and use, your models are built to create a final 2D image to capture and convey the essence of a particular internal space to a viewer. Talk about the difference between your process and that of an architect.

JC: I look at the process as one of dramatic simplification. I eliminate the extraneous but also add information — projecting myself into the architectural interior. The difference, I suppose, is that I am not assessing, analyzing or testing anything. I am creating something by identifying, magnifying, or emphasizing something that I think, or find, important. The space, when finished, must first and foremost meet my subjective needs. Sometimes, I tell myself that I identify what’s at the heart of spatial experience — at the heart of the experience of built space. And when I identify that, I try to embody it in a two-dimensional image with the two dimensional tools at my disposal. As if they have a parallel in a three-dimensional movement through space. At those times, maybe I kid myself because, ultimately, I don’t think that I can consciously address this, except through a kind of emotional projection. The tools I use to create that impression, that embody that projection, are the tools of photography, cinema, etc.

MM: The external form of these internal spaces, or the relationship of the internal space to the external space, is never revealed to the viewer of the final image. Do you aim to suggest, through the internal form and lighting of the model, the external form and space? Or is the isolation and disconnection of the space to an external form or space a deliberate decision?

JC: Of course, it’s a deliberate decision. There is no external form and space, to this: a two dimensional image of an interior space. These are images, which are not about the models themselves. They are about relationships between ideas.

MM: The spaces in your images appear to have a municipal or civic nature within ordinary (maybe often hidden?) structures designed to serve/control society, which are elevated and transformed into extraordinary spaces. Is this derived from a fascination with the inherent nature of these everyday spaces and their unconscious design aesthetic, or their transformation from ordinary to extraordinary?

JC: All art is exaggeration. Some of these are residential spaces, some public. I’m often pointing at the historic origins of different architectural types. Each image comes with a separate agenda, a separate subject. The Red Room and Green Staircase are generic 18th century American residential spaces. The Yellow Hallway is based on a room at Versailles, France. The Flooded Hallway is based on the bunkers at the Reichstag, in Berlin.

MM: The spaces photographed are in a state of flux. They suggest a recent departure, imminent occupation, or the post-disaster tranquillity of man-made structures after a flood or earthquake.

JC: I am not particularly interested in telling a story, in ‘narrative space’. A picture of a paper model suggests something transitory. Couple that with a flood, and perhaps it’s even more so.

MM: What are your criteria for selecting spaces to model, if actual buildings are the initial inspiration?

JC: I don’t really have any clear set of criteria. Looking back, the Four Flooded Arches were inspired by the Portuguese slave factories in West Africa. It was a very personal decision to build, flood, and photograph a space like that. But it was tied to my interest in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. And the images called Nevision Underground. They were also about an historic re-evaluation of Jefferson within the economic context of the international slave trade; about a fallen idol.

MM: Some of your models are more precise in detail and style (and therefore scale) than others. Why is this?

JC: Much of the work since the prison interiors from the early to mid-‘90s lacks detail, and is therefore more ambiguous in scale. The rooms could be made of concrete, and the illusion is simply more convincing. The Red, Green and Yellow rooms all have more detail, and therefore retain a bit more of that dollhouse quality.

MM: The scale of the final image, then, seeks to challenge the viewers’ perception of scale and understanding of the volumetric quality of the space. What are the criteria that determine the size and format of the final image?

JC: I tend to think of the size of the print in relation to the space in which the work is shown. I like to work with the particular space to highlight that relationship. With the larger prints, I want the viewer to feel tempted to enter into the illusion itself and leave the original, the model, or the construction behind — if only momentarily. I like to transform the space in which the work is shown, but also echo it, refer to it.

MM: The lighting of the models appears to be the primary tool by which you manipulate the quality of the space within the final images — the interplay of light and shadow to reveal forms and hence ‘space’ seems to be the critical factor in the image creation.

JC: I’m back to the old Modernist obsession with ‘Space as God’. Of course, I don’t mean this literally. I guess I mean two things: that space itself is the primary concern of building and not the building or object itself. And second, that because these are two-dimensional images, my concern as an artist is not with describing an object but with rendering an experience. Therefore, I want to use light, colour, texture, movement, reflection, etc. — or their absence — to break down the thing itself, so that I’m not just describing a preexisting thing, but referring to an idea.