James Casebere builds and then photographs architectural models, transforming them into large-scale two-dimensional images. His table-sized models, created from simple materials such as foam core, cardboard, and plaster, are often based on the artist's studies of actual buildings, such as prisons, Old West corrals, and suburban homes. Eschewing color and detail in favor of dramatic lighting and a low camera angle that distorts the scale of the buildings, Casebere examines cultural structures through architectural models that enact both fiction and reality.

In the photograph Venice Ghetto, stark white tenement buildings draped with clotheslines stand out from a black sky and the dark waters of the Venetian canals at night. Lights in only a few of the windows and two small boats docked against the buildings emphasize the emptiness of the nighttime scene. While the scene of Venice's stone buildings and canals may evoke nostalgia for the charm of Old Europe, the photograph's title alludes to the city's darker past. The Venice ghetto was established in 1516, when a Jewish settlement was set aside, shutting its occupants off from the rest of the city. Although no longer a restricted area, the Venice ghetto evokes historical Jewish subjugation and is a reminder of the Venetian origin of the word "ghetto." In Casebere's photograph, the eerie shadows enveloping the buildings hint at this area's somber history.

Casebere's architectural models serve as frameworks for cultural representations. His fictional spaces, structured by societal paradigms of living and working, most often allude to a conformity of living mandated by the standardization of built environments. His subjects of prisons, ghettos, interior courtyards, hospitals, tenements, and tunnels are places of confinement and control. Casebere's prison series stems from French philosopher Michel Foucault's ideas on the Panopticon system of control through surveillance. In this system, the architecture of the prison allows a prison guard to observe, and therefore wield power, from an all-seeing vantage point. Making connections to a seemingly unrelated structure, Casebere's suburban backyards similarly appear as places of regulation, uniformity, and restriction. In other words, Casebere positions architecture as society's means of imposing order through physical systems of control. Yet it is not just his subject that is one of control; it is his working method as well. By miniaturizing his subject in meticulously built models, the artist imposes control over reality through its diminutive scale, reconstruction, and eventual representation. Casebere's models, which are often based on photographs of buildings, are several times removed from their archetype, and photographs themselves, which carry with them the false imprimatur of reality, are carefully constructed fictions.

Scenes in Casebere's more recent work appear more realistic through sophisticated models and the use of subtle color, but his black-and-white photographs of the 1980s and early 1990s, including Venice Ghetto, have a self-consciously fabricated appearance. The initial perception of the image's reality dissolves upon closer inspection of the monolithic surfaces of the buildings, boats, and clothes hung out to dry. Yet the constant play between fiction and truth produces something mysterious in the scene. Devoid of human occupants, the photographed tableau appears as a deserted stage set, film still, or a moment of stopped time, leaving the viewer to contemplate a possible narrative that the scene might suggest. In Casebere's world, a diminutive, fictional architecture becomes an overwhelming presence where shadowy emptiness suggests isolation within the social sphere.