Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography

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When Sugimoto first arrived in New York in 1974, he was fascinated by the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. "I made a curious discovery," he later recalled. "The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I'd found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it's as good as real." Using careful framing, long exposure times, and a large view camera for clarity of detail, Sugimoto heightens the illusionism of the dioramas themselves, creating exquisite effigies of a natural world on the verge of disappearing.

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In the early 1990s, diCorcia traveled to Los Angeles on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and took photographs on a part of Santa Monica Boulevard frequented by male prostitutes, drifters, and drug addicts. For each picture he made there, he carefully composed his setting, then asked young men on the street to pose for him, giving them a small fee (from twenty to fifty dollars) negotiated each time. The titles always include the name, age, and birthplace of the model, as well as the amount paid. At the time, N.E.A. support of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe was highly controversial, and diCorcia had to sign a document stating that the work he produced on his fellowship would not be "obscene." Paying young men to pose for him was a way of symbolically sharing his grant with people whose behavior surely would have been condemned by the censors. The staged situation interacts with the raw reality of the exchange of money, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, yet preserving an authentic emotional charge.

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In 1972, when Levinthal was a student at the Yale School of Art, he bought a package of toy Nazi soldiers over Christmas break and began photographing them on the floor of his parents' house. He staged miniature battles, fashioned landscapes out of plastic garbage bags and top soil dusted with flour snow, set model airplanes on fire, and set off explosions using what he has described as "a variety of ridiculously unstable homemade incendiary devices." Shot using a very narrow depth of field and printed on high-contrast paper, the photographs have the gritty, out-of-focus quality of a photojournalist's images sent back from the front. Back at school, Levinthal teamed up with his fellow Yale art student Garry Trudeau (better known for his "Doonesbury" comic strip) and together they sequenced the images into a graphic chronicle of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. The result was the 1977 book Hitler Moves East, a masterpiece of historical imagination that sustains an unsettling tension between the innocence of child's play and the ghastly horrors of war.

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The eerily lit interiors in Kalpakjian's pictures do not exist in three-dimensional reality. Devoid of human presence, these virtual spaces are created on a computer with sophisticated architectural design programs such as Form Z and Lightscape. Kalpakjian begins by drawing a simple model on the screen, then uses the imaging software to manipulate the light, shadow, surface texture, and tone. Finally, he selects a view of the virtual space and renders the resulting digital image as a photographic print. This anonymous institutional corridor, with its vaguely unsettling feeling of airlessness, offers an apt metaphor for the sterile functionality of contemporary bureaucratic culture.

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Gober creates sculpture, installations, and photography, and is perhaps best known for his delicate, ghostly, hand-crafted versions of domestic fixtures, such as drains, beds, doors, and sinks. Through these uncanny replicas, he invests mass-produced objects with personal meaning—the private, unruly desires and memories of the individual. A longtime admirer of Hitchcock, Gober is also a master technician of suspenseful and disturbing imagery. In this photograph, what at first glance appears to be a common mousetrap set among some ferns is, upon closer examination, a human-scaled device that uncannily evokes the themes of contagion and control that run throughout the artist's work.

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Breuer is one of the last artists to have studied at the Düsseldorf Academy with Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose teaching influenced a generation of German photographers including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff. Like his teachers, Breuer accumulates individual examples of architectural types—in this case, the façades of transnational, post-industrial corporations that line the highways of the world. Photographed frontally under blank, white skies, the buildings appear flat and insubstantial, like floating billboards. Unlike the ugly but endearing modernist behemoths photographed by the Bechers, these vaguely sinister false fronts—here, of Nike—reveal nothing of what goes on inside, instead projecting the pure hypnotic power of a logo over a bright monochrome surface like heraldic emblems in an age of globalized commerce.

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Virtuoso of the commonplace, Muniz creates witty conceptual tableaux out of humble matter—portraits drawn in chocolate syrup, fake etchings made from miles of thread—that comment wryly on history and memory, perception and illusion. Continuing his affectionate assault on the giants of twentieth century art, Muniz constructed a Lilliputian version of Spiral Jetty—the late Robert Smithson's earthwork in the Great Salt Lake, Utah—out of dirt in his Brooklyn studio. While Muniz assumes the role of basement tinkerer to Smithson's Faustian persona, both created earthworks with dizzying shifts in scale and a marked temporal aspect: Spiral Jetty emerges and disappears with the tides, while its Brooklyn miniature was erased with a tilt of the table. Most important, Muniz highlights the crucial role that photography played in the Smithson "original," a site-specific work whose remoteness is counterbalanced by the camera's capacity for infinite reproduction and dissemination.

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Sternfeld's 1987 monograph American Prospects succinctly captured the anxious mood that beset the nation during the Carter and Reagan presidencies. Much of the book is set in the West, and its title refers ironically to the diminishing prospects—both physical and social—of the land that once symbolized boundless opportunity. Compared to the bright palette of Stephen Shore and the Southern Gothic of William Eggleston, Sternfeld's style is subdued in the manner of New Topographics photographers Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, and his borderline flatfooted approach perfectly suited the muted sense of apocalypse created at the time by nuclear meltdowns, hostage crises, and gas shortages.After a Flash Flood is one of Sternfeld's most effective images, showing a cross-section of a society perpetually sensing itself on the precipice of disaster. A razor-thin line separates order from chaos as a suburban housing complex seems to hover precariously over the maw of a recent mudslide that has swallowed a barely visible automobile. Although the photograph was not manipulated, the scene is suffused with a cinematic sense of unreality—a mood reflected in the very name of the California desert town depicted: Rancho Mirage.\

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The Urban Warfare Training Center is a mock city located in Israel's Tze'elim military base in the Negev desert. Built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and funded largely through U. S. military aid, the 7.4-square-mile generic city consists of modules that can be reconfigured by mission planners to represent specific towns. Known as Baladia City—the Arabic word balad means village—it is used by the Israel Defense Forces as well as by the U. S. Army to prepare soldiers for urban warfare. The simulated city includes shops, a grand mosque, a hospital, a Kasbah quarter, and a cemetery that doubles as a soccer field, depending on the scenario. The facility is equipped with an audio system that simulates helicopters, mortar rounds, and prayer calls. During training exercises, Arabic music is played in the background. Kremer's panoramic photograph—part of larger body of work focusing on the impact of Israel's ongoing military engagement on the natural landscape—captures and intensifies the haunting artifice of this simulated desert town.

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In the mid- to late 1970s Shore traveled the country by car, photographing the banal vernacular details of the national scene, from main streets and parking lots to office buildings and apartment complexes. Inspired by the sweeping documentary projects of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Shore's quiet, almost subdued sensibility differed greatly from the gritty social commentaries of his predecessors. He was also working in color at a time when it was considered vulgar, beneath the realm of serious art photography. This view of a deserted street-level office evokes the stillness, mystery, and melancholy of Edward Hopper's paintings, particularly his Drugstore of 1927 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In Shore's photograph, as in Hopper's painting, the empty storefront has a strangely artificial air, like a lighted stage set awaiting a dramatic scene.

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A professional printer as well as a photographer, Wyse makes technically assured yet enigmatically reticent images showing traces of past life or activity. The title of the series, Marks of Indifference, refers to an essay on photography and conceptual art by the artist Jeff Wall. Wyse uses this reference to denote the idea of the camera as a dispassionate recording device as well as the larger question of how artists' conscious and unconscious intentions manifest themselves in photographs. The "indifference" of the title also applies to the subjects of the pictures themselves: a car with a large dent in its side, a road sign surrounded by overgrown foliage, the marks left by shelves torn from a wall. In this photograph of a squirrel left for dead on a paved suburban street, the large scale, sharp focus, and unusual worm's-eye view combine to give the picture a powerful, dreamlike intensity.

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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.

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Using a large-format camera and available artificial light, Faulhaber photographs newly constructed architectural spaces—shopping malls, nightclubs, factories, sports arenas, offices, and apartments—just after they have been completed. Unpopulated and bearing no traces of everyday use, the environments are pristine and eerily hermetic. This view of a brightly lit gas station at night, with its disorienting sense of scale and immaculate newness, might easily be mistaken for a computer-generated model in an architect's studio. Surprisingly, Faulhaber achieves this effect through traditional photographic means rather than digital manipulation. His photographs' saturated colors and cool formal elegance heighten the inorganic beauty of the modern built environment, offering a lush yet ominous vision of postindustrial alienation.