Debi Cornwall, Model Citizens

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Radius Books (here). Hardcover, 9 x 11.8 inches, 204 pages, with 83 color reproductions. Includes essays by Kris Paulsen and Vanessa Codaccioni, notes from Michel Parmigiani and Nathalie Herschdorfer, a poem by W. H. Auden, and an images list with captions. (Cover and spread shots below.)

A French edition was published by Éditions Textuel in 2024 (here).

The Model Citizens project was awarded the 2023 Prix Elysée (here), sponsored by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Comments/Context: Coming out of our recent presidential election cycle in the United States and heading into a second Trump presidency, it’s hard not to notice just how distractingly mannered and performative our political process has become. Our daily news is now overwhelmed by a steady stream of performances (of patriotism, of masculinity, of outrage, of loyalty, of power, of “truth”, of violence, of admiration etc.), so much so that the pantomimes and playacting have become an entire code of recognizable conduct, decently far removed from what many of us might call reality.

The images in Debi Cornwall’s photobook Model Citizens were largely made in 2022 and 2023, and so now with the benefit of a couple of years of hindsight, clearly represent an intermediate evolutionary stage that came before the broader performative landscape we now see all around us. Cornwall had already identified this performative trend as she conceptualized her project, and then went looking for more visual evidence to clarify her thesis. Her resulting images bring together three separate but thoughtfully intertwined threads: the behaviors of attendees at Trump’s “Save America” rallies; the training exercises of new U.S. Border Patrol agents; and the setups found in historical dioramas on view in museums around the country. All three are filled with various kinds of role playing, costuming, staging, and theatrical behavior, providing Cornwall with the documentary raw material she needed to incisively tell her layered story.

Cornwall has been wrestling with the larger themes of surfaces, appearances, and role playing, especially as seen in the activities of the US military, for the better part of the past decade. Model Citizens is the third part of a trilogy of related projects, with Welcome to Camp America, Inside Guantánamo Bay (as 2017 gallery show, reviewed here) and Necessary Fictions (as 2020 photobook, reviewed here) providing the first two installments in her broader study. Seeing all three together now as an integrated artistic statement, a progression (or amplification) undeniably takes place, with Model Citizens offering an almost predictable end point to a surreally twisting journey that began with the stories we told ourselves about life at the military base housing the 9/11 detainees.

Before digging into the specifics of Cornwall’s photographs themselves, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the design and construction choices of Model Citizens as photobook object, as they play an important part in how we perceive the images. All of the images are displayed on thick French-folded pages (with nothing hiding inside the folds); the text pages are printed on two different paper stocks, one for the essays and longer texts, the other (even thinner) for the poem and a few hand-written definitions and notes. The images are either printed full bleed (across the gutter, on just one side of a spread, or around a page turn) or somewhat smaller, with varying amounts of white space on three sides, again often drifting across the gutter or over a page flip, in a few cases the turn cleverly (and intentionally) dividing a composition. The images from Cornwall’s three subject matter groups aren’t displayed as discrete sections, but are intermingled together into one integrated flow, with an image from one subject followed by one from another, and so on; given the way the images are varyingly hosted on the French folds, this creates a fully intermingled sequencing, where the performances of one subject wander into the performances of another, echoing each other and making “reality” that much harder to discern.

Cornwall’s historical diorama images run the gamut from the Revolutionary War to the war in Iraq, each picture a cropped interpretation of the simplified artificiality found in these museum setups. Many images feature the actions of generals, soldiers, nurses, and other military personnel of various kinds and ranks, in some cases with Cornwall narrowing her view all the way down to tightly framed faces of mannequins, where the details of aging clothing and makeup become more apparent. Many of her photographs highlight a kind of coded patriotism, where viewers are encouraged to sympathize with American heroes (and vilify any number of enemies) while ostensibly learning about the past. Cornwall is particularly successful with isolated action gestures, including fistfights, protective huddling, aggressive machine gun toting, and leaderly posing, which she then juxtaposes with gestures from the other sections of imagery, creating uneasy visual connections. What’s intriguing about these photographs is that their performative nature is essentially embedded or taken for granted, in that we fully understand and accept that we are being shown re-imagined scenes (often of violence), that we tend to take at face value, even when we realize that they have been stylized or even distorted beyond a realistic depiction of the actual events.

Cornwall’s photographs of U.S. Border Patrol training exercises are of course staged reenactments, with “crisis actors” (in many cases, Hispanic American civilians) playing the roles of illegal immigrants, who run away, hide in the bushes, and lash out with weapons (including one large rock) when cornered, while trainee agents try to apprehend them. So in a sense, everyone is playing a role in these mannered pictures, even the border agents, who are learning how to act in different situations. The explanatory titles of these scenes are instructive – “judgement scenario”, tracking scenario”, “triage scenario”, “aggressive alien scenario”, “active shooter scenario” – with several staged near the “mock border wall”. The images themselves are filled with both situational ambiguity and clearly coded behaviors and responses, creating a kind of cat-and-mouse playacting, where everyone is hitting their marks, reciting their lines, and following orders. These images bear the most resemblance to Cornwall’s earlier pictures from her Necessary Fictions project, albeit with a “toughness at the border” theme placed at the forefront.

The photographs Cornwall made at various “Save America” rallies are the weakest of the three subjects, both because we have been flooded with this kind of imagery of late and because Cornwall’s press credentials were denied by the Trump team, preventing her from actually getting inside the rallies themselves. Her solution to this problem was to come early and hang around with the die hards and true believers, who turned out to be just what she was looking for, as these tended to be the folks in elaborate costumes or who were willing to stand in long lines to take selfies with second tier MAGA luminaries like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Most of her photographs contain various forms of in-crowd signaling, from lapel pins and painted faces to full-on patriotic cosplay outfits in joyful red, white, and blue, each costume or gesture a way to overtly communicate personal support for and connection to the movement.

It’s when Cornwall merges these three bodies of work into a single flow that the artistic magic really happens. Gestures echo, expressions repeat, and symbols jump from one image to the next, creating a pleasing sense of juxtaposed confusion – time gets collapsed and it’s a little hard to remember which story we’re following at any one given moment. And it is this disorienting synthesis which makes Cornwall’s observations about the performative nature of contemporary American culture so powerful. Even in a country where we can no longer entirely agree on what the truth might be, our expectations for the performance of citizenship remain remarkably clear and consistent. But of course, Cornwall’s photographs also make a darker point that we may have lost the signal amidst all the additional noise, and that our extreme playacting has grown to become its own behavioral genre, almost unrelated to the authentic national patriotism it once represented. Which ultimately makes Model Citizens the most biting of Cornwall’s three projects. As the years have passed, the fictions she has been tracing have become more pervasive and destabilizing, our own fantasies and delusions turned back on themselves and amplified for effect. In the end, Model Citizens isn’t a particularly flattering portrait of 21st century American attitudes, but perhaps its perceptively layered observations can provide a visual argument that will catalyze some much needed discussion about the who, what, and why of the pervasive performance that now surrounds us.

Collector’s POV: Debi Cornwall does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time. As a result, interested collectors should likely follow up directly with the artist via her website (linked in the sidebar).

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