Over the last decade, Debi Cornwall has been investigating the fictions fueling America’s idea of itself. Her vivid, formally composed color documentary photographs serve more to provoke than to inform, inviting a closer examination of how state power is performed, consumed, and normalized. This exhibition features two bodies of work representing two sides of the same coin.
What are the stories power tells, the games it plays, to manage unsettling realities?
– NECESSARY FICTIONS
Necessary Fictions frames this question through the lens of immersive, realistic wargames.
On ten military bases across the United States, Debi Cornwall documents mock‑village landscapes in the fictional country of “Atropia” and its population, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios.
Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many who fled war, now recreate it in the service of the U.S. military. Real soldiers preparing to deploy practice their possible futures as fighters or casualties of war.
– MODEL CITIZENS
How do staging, performance and roleplay inform ideas about citizenship in a violent land whose people no longer agree on what is true?
Model Citizens considers the United States as a case study in this global phenomenon, with images made in three kinds of sites: immersive, realistic training scenarios at the U.S. Border Patrol Academy, Donald Trump’s right-wing “Save America” rallies, and historical museums staging Americans as heroic victors or innocent victims.
Jarringly juxtaposed images from these apparently unrelated sites illuminate systems that reconcile, justify, or distract from the violence pervading a militarized culture.
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Born 1973 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, United States.
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
/ Model Citizens is an exhibition coproduced by Photo Elysée, Lausanne and the Rencontres d’Arles.
/ Model Citizens was awarded the 2023 Prix Elysée. This prize is the result of an exclusive partnership between Photo Elysée and Parmigiani Fleurier.
/ Photo Elysée, Cantonal Museum for Photography, is a Museum of the Canton de Vaud managed by the Plateforme 10 Foundation.
/ Prints realized by Picto, Paris and framing by Circad, Paris.
/ Publications: Model Citizens, Radius Books, 2024 and Citoyens modèles, Éditions Textuel, 2024.
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» GET TO KNOW THE ARTIST «
Born in the United States, Debi Cornwall is a conceptual documentary artist who returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Employing absurdity and dark humour, she sheds some light on invisible systems by layering still and moving images with testimony and archival material.
Debi Cornwall’s first book, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Book 2017), was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook Prize and the Arles Photo-Text Book Award. It was named one of The New York Times Magazine’s top 10 photobooks of 2017. Hyperallergic praised her “eye for the deadpan ordinary detail that lacerates with banality… destabilize[ing] Gitmo’s façade of normalcy through incisive juxtapositions and interpolations.” The book has been exhibited in 15 countries, including Switzerland, South Korea, Belgium, and Germany.
Cornwall’s work is held in institutional collections in the U.S., Belgium, France, and Brazil. It has been featured in European Photography Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, Art in America, Polka, Fisheye, and The Guardian.
