Debi Cornwall: Model Citizens

David Benjamin Sherry’s photographs of the American West remind us why nature is worth preserving.

– The New York Times

American Monuments is a landscape photography project that captures the spirit and intrinsic value of America’s threatened system of national monuments. In April 2017, an executive order called for the review of the twenty-seven national monuments created since January 1996. In December 2017, the final report called on the president to shrink four national monuments and change the management of six others, recommending that areas in Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans be offered for sale, specifically for oil drilling and coal and uranium mining. American Monuments focuses on the areas under review, with special emphasis on those that have already been decimated. 

David Benjamin Sherry documents these pristine, sacred, and wildly diverse areas using the traditional, historic 8 × 10-inch format. The resulting photographs not only convey the beauty of these important and ecologically diverse sites, but also shed light upon the plight of the perennially exploited landscape of the American West.

Limited edition of this book available HERE

Who By Fire considers contemporary American life as it relates to a complex history of economic, religious, and political environments. Kimball's work wrestles with the complications of the current moment while trying to imagine the promise of a future that is unknown and tenuous. Unflinching photographs of people in neighborhoods, streets, and yards document moments where the burden of the present day visibly presses in upon bodies and physical surroundings, while also conveying the resilience and hope maintained under that weight.

The people in these pictures are further contextualized by photographs that point to the visual markers of humanity in the landscape, either unintended or by design: a wall painting of a sun dial, a rising angel nailed to the side of a barn, a woman asleep on a blanket paired with a tree set on fire.

Learn more about the accompanying limited edition HERE.

In a word, it’s hard country to photograph, featureless and dismal even at the sweet hours of dawn and dusk, which makes Debi Cornwall’s aptly titled photographic suite Necessary Fictions all the more remarkable.

— Gregory McNamee, Los Angeles Review of Books

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.

Limited edition of this book available HERE

“Welcome to Camp America operates by way of delicate juxtaposition.”
—Michael McCanne, Art in America

Photography and essay by Debi Cornwall
Texts by Moazzam Begg & Fred Ritchin

Hardcover
7 x 9.5 inches
160 pages / 70 color images
Includes 14 insert images

ISBN: 9781942185314

Rare: $150

Limited edition of this book available HERE