From Courtrooms to Cameras: Debi Cornwall Invites Us to Look Anew
Interviewer
Stefano De Luigi is an award-winning documentary photographer known for exploring social and cultural themes, particularly through long-term projects on marginalized communities. His notable work, Blanco: Visions of Blindness, published in 2010 by Trolley, was supported by WHO/Vision 2020 and the W. Eugene Smith Fellowship. This project earned him the World Press Photo second prize in 2011, showcasing his impactful storytelling.
Beginning his career in Paris, De Luigi documented the Louvre’s renovations in the early 1990s, which shaped his immersive approach. From 2003 to 2008, he collaborated with CBM and WHO on Vision 2020, highlighting individuals with blindness. His 2006 project, Cinema Mundi, spotlighted global cinema outside Hollywood, premiering at the Locarno Film Festival in 2007.
De Luigi has won the World Press Photo award four times and was recognized by the Soros Foundation’s Moving Walls in 2009. His TIA project on the African continent earned top prizes from Days Japan and the Getty Grant for Editorial Photography in 2010. Published in Stern, GEO, Le Monde Magazine, and The New Yorker, his work has been exhibited worldwide, solidifying his place as a leading voice in documentary photography.
Throughout his career, Stefano has published 7 books and been a member of the VII Foundation since 2008.
Interviewee
Debi Cornwall is a transdisciplinary documentary artist who returned to visual expression after a twelve-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Marrying dark humor, rigorous research, and structural critique, she uses still and moving images, testimony, and archival material to examine the fictions fueling America’s idea of itself.
In 2023, Debi was awarded the Prix Elysée, a biennial juried contemporary photography prize created by Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, to complete and publish Model Citizens, the last in a trilogy of photobooks about the American condition in the post-9/11 era. Honors also include a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant in film, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in photography, and a Leica Women Foto Project Award. Her photography books, films, and installations have been profiled in publications including Art in America, European Photography Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Photograph, Le Monde, and Hyperallergic.
A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, and faculty member at the ICP, Debi lives in Brooklyn, New York.
© Sally Low
Stefano de Luigi for Hot Mirror: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Debi. The first question I’d like to ask is about your journey, which I find particularly intriguing. Your path has many layers and levels. You started as a civil-rights lawyer after graduating from Harvard Law School and practiced for over a decade, focusing on wrongful convictions. Exhaustive research and a strong determination to fight against injustices seem to have been your driving forces. How much of this legacy has carried over into your practice as an artist today? What were the events that led you to cross the Rubicon and step forward as an artist to express this deep need for justice more profoundly? Can you share more about this critical transition—if it was a specific moment—and why you felt compelled to make this change?
DC: After twelve years of representing innocent DNA exonerees in lawsuits meant to effect systemic change in the criminal justice system, I was burnt out. Though the work was rewarding and I had close relationships with my clients, I was fueled by outrage and had little energy left over at the end of each day. After a lengthy trial, I took a three-month sabbatical and realized I needed to live differently. I stepped away from my law practice, intending to leave the law behind. But it turns out that my experiences over those many years—of thinking systemically, of digging for answers, of using individual pieces of evidence to expose larger truths—had a profound influence on how I think, look, and make as an artist. Research and negotiation remain integral to my visual practice. But where, as a lawyer, my role was to marshal evidence proving my client’s case, as an artist I’m not telling you what to think. I’m weaving together materials to recontextualize, offering a new perspective to complex social problems.
Mock Border Wall 2
U.S. Border Patrol Academy, Artesia, New Mexico
From Model Citizens (Radius Books, 2024) | Citoyens Modèles (Éditions Textuel, 2024)
SDL: I remember thinking, when I saw your first work in 2014, "Gitmo at Home, Gitmo at Play"—now part of the “Welcome to Camp America” project—that your aesthetics and narrative seemed to stem from a profound need to articulate multiple concepts within the same frame. This inevitably distances the viewer from what could be called a two-dimensional account, confronting them instead with a series of intellectual challenges. What challenges has needing to represent reality in a more complex way, brought to your narrative? How have you managed to articulate multiple messages on the flat surface of a single frame?
DC: When we first met, I was just starting to develop my Guantánamo project. The “War on Terror” prisons at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (known as “Gitmo” after its call letters, GTMO) are a very unique place to make pictures. Access is strictly controlled by U.S. military authorities. Press visits are no longer allowed, but when I visited in 2014 and 2015, photographers were accompanied at all times by military escorts and banned from photographing a long list of things, including any faces. Even partial profiles would be deleted in daily “Operational Security Review.” It was impossible to do a “day in the life” kind of social documentary photo essay. Nor could I rely on the eyes-as-window-to-the-soul kind of emotional image-making there. I had to learn to work differently. So, I developed a new approach. My proposal had been to photograph Guantánamo Bay “off duty.” And when my first military escort declared, “Gitmo is the best posting a soldier could have. There’s so much fun to be had here!” I saw an opportunity. I looked at what I was being asked to see, knowing I would add context later.
But how do you photograph the “show,” getting past the surface to reveal the performance without just repeating official propaganda? It took me three visits to understand how to accomplish that. Within each frame I used formal composition and vivid color, often seeking out the absurd and unexpected. Across the series, I worked in typologies, juxtaposing residential and leisure spaces of guards and inmates. I photographed the “fun” I was shown, but the spaces look empty, forlorn. Does it look fun to you? More complex meaning, or at least an invitation for you to think critically, arises in the disconnect between what you expected and what I’m showing you.
Kiddie Pool
U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
Medium-format negative hand-developed on site under watch of military censors.
From Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Books, 2017)
Compliant Detainee Media Room, Camp 5.
U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
From Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Books, 2017)
The military’s ”no faces” rule profoundly influenced how I thought about portraying the members of Gitmo’s global diaspora for the next chapter of the project.
Smoke Break, Camp America
U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
From Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Books, 2017)
I knew from my work with domestic exonerees that the trauma remains long after the body is freed. But how to convey that in a silent, still photograph? I proposed to each man that we make an environmental portrait as though he were still held at Gitmo, and subject to that “no faces” rule. They understood immediately what I was getting at, and agreed. Ultimately, I photographed 14 men in nine countries, plus a former guard who converted to Islam while deployed to Guantánamo Bay.
For those who returned home, like Murat, a Turkish German refugee counselor, we chose locations of relevance to their lives, in his case a refugee-housing complex.
Murat, Turkish German (Germany)
Held: 4 Years, 7 Months, 22 Days
Released: August 24, 2006
Charges: never filed
From Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Books, 2017)
For those, like Hussein, a Yemini transferred to Slovakia, we chose locations highlighting the disorientation of being sent to a country where you don’t even speak the language. I photographed him outside at midday prayer in the only country in Europe without a mosque.
Hussein, Yemeni (Slovakia)
Held: 12 Years, 6 Months, 11 Days
Cleared: January 12, 2009
Transferred to Slovakia: November 20, 2014
Charges: never filed
From Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Books, 2017)
You can’t gaze into their eyes and have an emotionally cathartic moment – you have to work a little harder. But there’s so much information there if you take the time to look: not only the environment, but his body language, his clothing, how he wears it. Each man is alone.
Djamel, Berber (Algeria)
Held: 11 Years, 11 Months, 18 Days
Cleared: October 9, 2008 & May 8, 2009
Released: December 4, 2013
Charges: never filed In U.S.
Acquitted and exonerated at trial in Algeria.
From Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Books, 2017)
The first time I exhibited Welcome to Camp America in a Muslim country was in Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates. One local visitor told me he saw Djamel’s portrait across the room, and, without knowing anything about the exhibition, grasped intuitively that he had been through something. The visitor was drawn to look, and was moved by what he saw. That felt so validating.
Installation view, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay
xPosure Festival, Sharjah, U.A.E. (2022)
SDL: The titles of projects often serve not only to introduce the theme but also to define the personality of the author. I find that “Necessary Fictions” is perhaps the most significant when I think of your work as a whole. The necessary dose of fiction to speak about the circumstantial realities that shape our daily lives—realities subjected to massive manipulations. How do you navigate this web of visual manipulations that permeate our societies? Once you've chosen a path, how do you separate them and make them visible and legible through your work?
DC: Looking back on my trilogy of books over the last decade—Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius, 2017); Necessary Fictions (Radius, 2020), and Model Citizens/ Citoyens Modèles (Radius/Textuel, 2024)—I’m finally able to see how I’m working: I try within each frame and across each sequence, to make you look twice, to become aware of your assumptions, and see from a new perspective. The whole becomes more than the sum of the parts.
I want the work to make you curious about what is happening and prompt you to reconsider what you thought you knew. The titles, like the pictures, tend to work on multiple levels. How much fun should we be having in Gitmo’s “Camp America”? What is “necessary,” after all? What is a “model citizen”? According to whom?
Fawzia & Nabil H.
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California
From Necessary Fictions (Radius Books, 2020)
The Embrace 2
“Save America” Rally
Miami, Florida
From Model Citizens (Radius Books, 2024) | Citoyens Modèles (Éditions Textuel, 2024)
When I came back to photography in 2014 after an 18-year detour to law school and practice, everything had changed. Suddenly we were in a digital era, bombarded by images. While documentary photography was always a subjective take on the truth, in this new world of AI and weaponized disinformation, we must be all the more skeptical of images. So rather than making pictures to inform you about the truth, I’m documenting fictions, staging, performance, and roleplay to invite you to join me in grappling with social questions. I want to prompt you to ask “what’s going on here?” I’m questioning how “post-truth” is pervading every aspect of society: not only how official fictions, or “state-created realities” function, but also how we consume those messages and enact our respective realities within our chosen affinity groups.
Judgment Scenario 1
U.S. Border Patrol Academy, Artesia, New Mexico
From Model Citizens (Radius Books, 2024) | Citoyens Modèles (Éditions Textuel, 2024)
It's all about context. A single photograph might work on one level, but the full depth of meaning only emerges from juxtaposing different elements, often things that don’t obviously belong together, whether photographs, archival material, or text, in a sequence, book, or installation.
SDL: Picasso with Guernica, Chaplin with The Great Dictator—many great artists have engaged with the political themes of their time. Do you think this is the role of an artist today? I ask because engaging in the political game implies activism, taking a side. Should an artist take a side? And if they do, don’t they risk losing some of the universality of their message? How can an artist start from the personal to reach the universal, avoiding ideological traps and resisting the pressure to align with one camp? We live in a highly polarized era, which challenges us to remain legitimate while holding clear views on the issues your work explores. How can one maintain legitimacy—if not objectivity—in today’s world? And, perhaps most importantly, how can one touch the soul of viewers who hold beliefs so far from our own, especially on topics like democracy, civil rights, and tolerance?
DC: I think each artist defines her own role. My work isn’t about my political opinion. The work is political, yes, but it’s not partisan. I’m trying to understand and make visible the cultural air we breathe as Americans. I respect artists who take a side. At the same time, having been an advocate, I understand how to make change in people’s lives, and that’s not how I see my role as an artist. I’m working differently now. I’m not interested in speaking only to those who agree with me. Instead, I want to invite you to consider how power operates no matter whom you voted for. This is the power of imagery: we tend to filter out arguments we disagree with, but you can’t unsee. If the visual sparks a visceral reaction in the body and raises questions for you, that can be the start of a conversation. Maybe a conversation between people who would not otherwise engage with each other.
Speaking of The Great Dictator, which I watched recently and recommend, humor feels super important. I’m increasingly drawn to the strange, the absurd, (dark) humor, using levity as a strategy for inviting people to consider difficult or complex realities.
Turkey Vulture ($11.99)
From Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius Books, 2017)
Aggressive Alien Scenario
U.S. Border Patrol Academy, Artesia, New Mexico
From Model Citizens (Radius, 2024) | Citoyens Modèles (Textuel, 2024)
SDL: After receiving significant attention for your projects, including notable accolades such as the Prix Élysée in 2023 and an exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2024, where do you see yourself at this stage in your career? Is this a moment of evolution after a series of projects focused on the representation of power? What are your desires and needs for the near and medium-term future?
DC: It’s been a whirlwind couple of years since being shortlisted and winning the 2023 Prix Elysée, and then planning last summer’s Arles exhibition. I’m taking a step back now, considering how I’m working, why, and what I’d like to accomplish. I want to keep learning, growing, solving new artistic problems, experimenting with new forms. My trilogy of books about the post-9/11 American condition with Radius, my Santa Fe-based nonprofit publisher, feels like a complete thought. I find myself increasingly drawn toward exploring time-based work with film and sound. There are so many more elements involved that lend themselves to layering and weaving. I find it somehow easier to innovate in this form. I’m learning to trust my instincts. There’s something so freeing about figuring it out as I go, not being tied to anyone else’s idea of how I should be operating. That’s where I am in life and my creative practice: if it’s a little terrifying, that’s a good sign.
Installation view, Model Citizens
Espace Monoprix, les Rencontres d’Arles, France 2024
SDL: Teaching is part of your life, as it has been for many artists over time, often for economic reasons but also out of a desire to pass on knowledge to future generations. How important do you consider teaching as a social role for an artist? How much of your energy does teaching require, and how significant is this role to you personally?
DC: I love teaching, and I devote everything to it when we’re in session, whether it’s a one-off lecture and crit or my own class at the ICP. It’s pure joy to help others refine their thinking and their making, to plumb deeper layers in their work. The ICP student body is incredibly international, so the credits and conversations are always illuminating. And I always learn from my students. They invariably see something new in work I’ve looked at a hundred times before, and have brilliant insights in their own work. It’s intense and invigorating.
SDL: Your work remains deeply rooted in America. Is this a deliberate choice? The representation of power and its nuances, the manipulative power of subliminal messages, and the tangible effects these manipulations have on people—are these dynamics stronger in the United States than in other parts of the world? Why have you chosen to focus on the United States while addressing these universal themes? Do you believe it is more effective because, as an American citizen, you can perceive the subtleties more clearly, or because you consider yourself positioned at the epicenter of power, and therefore a privileged observer? Could you elaborate on this choice?
DC: As an American living in the United States, I feel a responsibility to investigate what we are doing to ourselves, and to the world. And I have the tools to do so. In any given system here, I can find the person in charge of access, how to appeal to a higher authority within a bureaucracy if the initial answer is “no.” I am persistent.
The performance of American power looks unique compared to other countries, yes. At the same time, I see my work in the U.S. as a case study in a global phenomenon: rising militarized, anti-immigrant nationalism, performative disinformation, splintered realities. At some point I’d love to make new work in another country. I’m keeping my eyes open for ideas and opportunities. A residency? A commission? An invitation to dig into an institutional archive? I’m open to it.
Flagraising
“Save America” Rally, Miami, Florida
From Model Citizens (Radius, 2024) | Citoyens Modèles (Textuel, 2024)
SDL: The nature of your work seems to focus on the manipulative power of images through the representation of symbols. In the metaphors you create with your photography, how do you deal with the inherently manipulative power of the photographic medium itself? How do you avoid the risk that your own images, created to reveal and provoke reflection on manipulation, might themselves be criticized as manipulative?
DC: It's a delicate balance. I’m trying to use my images to call attention to the ways in which we are manipulated by staging and performance. You’re going to perceive my photographs through the lens of your own lived experience, your worldview. I want you to be skeptical. Again I come back to context. In the larger bodies of work, I’m creating a framework that tees up these questions for you.
Private Second Class Leonard O.
From Necessary Fictions (Radius, 2020)
Corporal, 9th Infantry Division
From Model Citizens (Radius, 2024) | Citoyens Modèles (Textuel, 2024)
SDL: What nourishes your daily life beyond your practice and, I imagine, the discovery of photographic works and projects? What passions and interests fuel your artistic vision and poetic sensibility?
DC: I’m a voracious consumer of art and stories. Not just photographs but fine art, contemporary art, in museums and galleries, in films, novels, essays on theory—it’s all an important part of my practice and also a respite from working. Spending time with loved ones, cooking, sharing a meal. And daily movement is key: yoga, hiking, kickboxing. I thrive on endorphins.
SDL: Perhaps you have already touched upon the next question, but in your view, what is the role of an artist in contemporary society? And what do you see as the difference between yourself and a whistleblower?
DC: I think it really depends on who you want to be. Those consciously working within the art market have a particular role within that system. They need to make work that will sell. I have collectors, but I don’t consider the market during the making of my work. I see my role as probing, challenging, illuminating. I’m trying to understand what is happening in society, and to invite a dialogue. I’m visualizing the question in an unexpected way in hopes of generating critical inquiry. I want the work to be meaningful not only now, but also in the decades to come.
SDL: What advice would you give to a young artist starting out today? How relevant is it to build a strong visual communication strategy around their projects as a tool to increase visibility? I’m referring to social media platforms like Instagram or Linkedin or our own website—do you find them important or relevant? Beyond the solidity of an artist’s work, how critical do you think it is to use these tools, offered by a technologically advanced society, to present and share one’s work with others through social media?
DC: I’m pretty terrible at social media. I tend not to post my actual work since the meaning I’m after won’t really register in single images. I’ll post updates and events, but otherwise I’m mainly a consumer, looking to see what’s happening in the world. Though it’s great for finding people: I found a number of men cleared and released from Guantánamo on Facebook years ago before I closed my account, and connected with the protagonist of my short experimental found-footage documentary film, Pineland/Hollywood, on LinkedIn.
I’d say to those starting out in photography, young or otherwise, that if you’re interested in working editorially, having a strong Instagram presence can be very important. Editors will find you, and a strong following might also help you get assignments. But don’t go chasing followers for the sake of likes. Honing your vision is the most important. Some incredibly successful artists don’t have a social media presence at all.
Be patient. It takes time to resolve work and get it out into the world. Or if, like me, impatience is your Achilles heel, let your impatience fuel your focus on making.
Foster community. Meeting people in person, whether at portfolio reviews, festivals, art fairs, or openings makes a huge difference. I’ve met some of my closest friends and collaborators that way. It’s so helpful to have a crit group or be in relationship with colleagues who lend an outside eye for each other as your work is coming together. You need people whose judgment you respect, who will be honest with you about what isn’t working, in the service of making it better. And do the same in return: it’s important to show up for people.
SDL: A question about your latest project in progress, “This is (Not) a Drill.” If I’m not mistaken, it seems to be a “participatory” project where you invite testimonies and the involvement of a broader audience. What are your thoughts on the value of such an approach, which has become increasingly common in creative practices, involving one’s research subjects in the creation of the work? I’m thinking specifically of Susan Meiselas’s work with people she photographed during the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua or in Iraqi Kurdistan. This approach challenges us to deconstruct the traditional icons of both the photographer as a witness and the subject as an icon, in order to reconstruct a new way of seeing. Is this also your current modus operandi with this new project?
DC: I have so much respect for socially engaged practices like Susan’s. It feels less extractive than the ethnographic documentary of the past. And it’s not so much about the photographer’s witnessing or being a “capital-A Author,” as it is focusing on how people are affected by abuses of power.
I’ve experimented with this approach photographically, inviting Djamel, the Berber ex-detainee from Guantánamo, to intervene in my photographs from the prison complex. One of the images he chose to annotate was “Comfort Items,” a show cell laid out for official and press visitors to show the amenities available to inmates depending on their level of compliance with prison rules. Djamel’s experience revealed the reality underlying that staged set.
Comfort Items, Camp 5 (Stop Lying to the World)
© Debi Cornwall and Djamel Ameziane
In “This is (Not) a Drill,” I’m interviewing American schoolchildren about their experiences of lockdowns, lockdown drills, and active-shooter simulations. In a country where school shootings are considered inevitable, lockdown drills are yet another iteration of performative fictions used to manage difficult truths. Kids don’t get a vote—not on whether to do these drills, how they should be run, or the national gun policies that prioritize gun ownership over school safety. So, it feels very important to listen to their experiences. I’m grateful to the kids and their families for trusting me with their stories. You won’t hear me or any other adult voices in the film. And you won’t see the kids either. As I’ve done in other contexts, I’m weaving multiple voices into a single narrative thread, and not showing any faces. It’s not about the identities of these particular children (26 in 11 states so far, always with written parental permission), but about the larger context: how does it feel not to know if it’s a drill or the real thing? We’re giving adult viewers a visceral experience that excruciates ambiguity. If that is intolerable, then perhaps we need to be approaching this issue differently as a society.
This short film is still a work-in-progress, but it’s my hope that it will be shown not only as a multichannel museum piece, but also as a single-channel short in community venues around the U.S., followed by a facilitated conversations about what we are and are not willing tolerate in balancing gun rights against school safety. If they choose to, the kids and families who participate in making the film can become an important part of that wider conversation.
SDL: What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence being used as a tool to create worlds and scenarios disconnected from reality? Do you see it as a resource? A technology that doesn’t interfere with your artistic practice? A threat to your voice as an artist? Or perhaps an additional danger in the manipulative arsenal of propaganda?
DC: Aside from being aghast at the unnecessary energy consumption, the coopting of intellectual property, and the polluting of internet search results, I am thoroughly uninterested in AI. We must start teaching critical looking and thinking skills in schools. Is this image real? How do we know? What does the imagemaker have to gain? Why does it matter?
AI also makes it all the more important for photographers to be transparent in how they are working. As AI improves, it will be increasingly difficult to discern the computer-generated from the light-based, fake from real. We’ll need to rely on the respect we have earned based on our past practice for our work to continue to have cultural value.
Thank you Stefano, what a pleasure to be in conversation with you again!
All photographs © Debi Cornwall