Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions

What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Necessary Fictions explores the performance of American power and identity in the post-9/11 era. During trips to ten military bases across the United States since 2016, DEBI CORNWALL documented mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of “Atropia” and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the U.S. military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in “moulage”—fake wounds—as they prepare to deploy.

Cornwall presents a meta-reality—the artifice of war—and the book combines her photographs with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America’s fantasy industrial complex. With texts by Sarah Sentilles, PEN Award-winning critical theorist; Makeda Best, PhD, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University; Nomi Stone, PhD, Pushcart Prize-winning poet; and an original work of fiction from Lannan Literary Fellow Roy Scranton, PhD.

Debi Cornwall is a multimedia documentary artist who returned to visual expression after a twelve-year career as a civil rights lawyer. While completing her BA in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, she studied photography at RISD. She then received a JD from Harvard Law School and practiced as a wrongful conviction attorney, also training as amediator. Exhaustive research and negotiation were critical to her advocacy and remain integral to her visual practice. In addition to the Prix Elysée, Debi has been honored with accolades including a NYFA Fellowship in Photography, a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant in Film, an inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award, and the Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award. Her work has been profiled in publications such as Art in America, European Photography Magazine, British Journal of Photography, The New York Times Magazine, and Hyperallergic, and is held in public and private collections around the world. As an ICP faculty member, Cornwall teaches students how to plumb deeper layers in their work. Cornwall has also published two other Radius Books: Model Citizens (2024) and Welcome to Camp America, Inside Guantánamo Bay (2017). She lives in Brooklyn, NY.