LOCATION: Landskrona Foto, Tyghuset. MAP. Buy festival tickets
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 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.
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.
Debi Cornwall is an American conceptual documentary artist who has focused on her career as an artist since 2014 after practicing for twelve years as a civil rights attorney. Employing absurdity and dark humor, she excavates invisible systems by layering still and moving images with testimony and archival material. Her books Welcome to Camp America : Inside Guantánamo Bay and Necessary Fictions (Radius Book, 2017 and 2020) have received numerous awards. She has received, among other honors, the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Photography, the Leica Women Foto Project Award, and the Harpo Foundation Visual Artist Grant, and has also been nominated for the W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant.
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.
