Welcome to Camp America Exhibition
Welcome to Camp America is on view at the Centre de la Photographie Genève (Switzerland) through May 14, 2017. Thereafter the exhibition is available to travel in Europe and the United States, along with the photo book, which will be launched by Radius Books later this year. As images from the most recent chapter, Beyond Gitmo, are embargoed until the book launch, the CPG installation video is password protected for now, and images within the installation views page omit photographs of all but one released man. Please contact me to receive the password.
Installation view, Centre de la Photographie Genève (2017)
An installation video from the Punctum Award-winning solo exhibition at the Lianzhou Foto Festival, which did not include the final chapter of work, can be viewed below.
Installation view, Lianzhou Foto Festival (2016)
Description: This exhibition uses vivid, unexpected images to invite audiences to look anew at a subject many have stopped seeing. In finding common ground between guards and prisoners, military and civilian, left and right, it offers a new discourse about Guantánamo Bay, provoking new questions about American-ness—and civil society across the global West—marrying empathy and dark humor with systemic critique.
What does daily life look like in a place where nobody has chosen to live, and where photographs of faces are forbidden? Former civil rights attorney and conceptual documentary photographer Debi Cornwall’s exhibition, Welcome to Camp America, offers an unprecedented view of a mysterious and forbidden American site: the "War on Terror" prisons at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (known as “Gitmo”).
Gitmo at Home, Gitmo at Play series), and gift-shop souvenirs (Gitmo on Sale series). In the 15 years since its prisons opened, Gitmo has housed 780 "detainees." The vast majority have been cleared and released, returning home or transferred to third countries. In the Beyond Gitmo series, Cornwall collaborates with 14 former prisoners in nine countries, from Albania to Qatar, plus a former guard, to make environmental portraits replicating, in the free world, the military’s “no faces” rule.
Programming: This work addresses not only Guantánamo itself, but also larger themes of justice, rights, security and humanity that apply equally in the United States as in Europe in the post-9/11 era. The artist, drawing on her background as a civil rights lawyer and trained mediator, looks forward to working with curators to plan workshops, lectures and panels to engage local audiences around the issues raised by the exhibition.
Please email debi@debicornwall.com for a PDF of the exhibition description and checklist.
