Debi Cornwall: Model Citizens

The last in a trilogy of books on the American condition, Model Citizens considers the United States as a case study into a global phenomenon: How have staging, performance, and roleplay come to inform thinking about citizenship in a violent land whose people no longer agree on what is true?

Jarringly juxtaposed images from apparently unrelated sites—such as US Border Patrol Academy training scenarios, “Save America” rallies, and history museums—illuminate systems that reconcile, justify, or distract from the harsh realities of life in a polarized, militarized society. The design accentuates slippages: images flow across French-fold page turns, just as Cornwall’s practice questions the role of documentary photography in an era of splintered realities. 

The Model Citizens project was awarded the 2023 Prix Elysée, a biennial juried prize for mid-career photographers, sponsored by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. The award also includes a grant for a concurrent publication in both English and French (Citoyens Modèles, Éditions Textuel, 2024). Both editions will be released to coincide with Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles in July 2024.

Debi Cornwall is a multimedia documentary artist who returned to visual expression after a twelve-year career as a civil rights lawyer. She received her BA in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She then received a JD from Harvard Law School and practiced as a wrongful conviction attorney. In addition to the Prix Elysée, Debi has been honored with accolades including a NYFA Fellowship in Photography, a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, an inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award, and the Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award. Her work has been profiled in 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. Model Citizens is Cornwall’s third Radius book, after Necessary Fictions (2020) and Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (2017). She lives in Brooklyn.

Kris Paulsen is Associate Professor of History of Art and Film Studies at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT Press, 2017), which received the 2018 Ann Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her work traces the intersections of art and technology, from photography to computational media, with a particular emphasis on telepresence, virtuality, and Artificial Intelligence. She received a BA from Brown University, and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Debi Cornwall is a multimedia documentary artist who returned to visual expression after a twelve-year career as a civil rights lawyer. She received her BA in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She then received a JD from Harvard Law School and practiced as a wrongful conviction attorney. In addition to the Prix Elysée, Debi has been honored with accolades including a NYFA Fellowship in Photography, a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, an inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award, and the Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award. Her work has been profiled in 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. Model Citizens is Cornwall’s third Radius book, after Necessary Fictions (2020) and Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (2017). She lives in Brooklyn.