Pictures are the Context is the 2024 Laskey Charrette project that examines how photographs influence and distort our perception of the built environment. Over the weekend workshop (February 16-18) students fabricated a photograph of a room into a diorama. To do so they did what Leslie Laskey (b. 1921, Manistee) suggests, to look closely because ‘the more you look the more you see, supposedly’ (Wild, “47 Views of Leslie Laskey”). The room photographs for the workshop were chosen from the work of Thomas Demand (b. 1964, Munich). Demand is a German artist famous for collecting mass media imagery to inform the rooms he constructs as paper models and then photographs them. For Demand, and for the students, the pictures are the context; the photography depicts rooms that are built from the imagery we collect.

Similar to Laskeys aphorism, we looked again and again at the room photograph to approximate the material texture, colour, pattern, shape, and thickness shown. The workshop objective was to translate the Demand photographs into a well-crafted diorama that is not a replica of the image, but instead a model for new ways of seeing the room.