About this item
Welcome to Camp America is Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights attorney Debi Cornwall's vivid and disorienting glimpse into the US Naval Station in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba -- known as "Gitmo" -- through photographs, once-classified government documents and first-person accounts.The book gathers three series: Gitmo at Home, Gitmo at Play showing residential and leisure spaces of both prisoners and guards; Gitmo on Sale, depicting the commodification of American military power through gift-shop souvenirs; and Beyond Gitmo, investigating life after detention with 14 men once held as accused terrorists, now cleared and freed, living in nine countries from Albania to Qatar. Environmental portraits in the free world replicate conditions of military regulation photography at Guantnamo Bay: no faces are shown.
About the Author
Debi Cornwall is a conceptual documentary artist who returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a civil rights lawyer. Informed by her experience representing innocent DNA exonerees, her long-term photographic projects marry empathy with dark humor, investigating power and American-ness in the post-9/11 era. Her first book, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay, was shortlisted for the 2017 Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook Award and the 2017 Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles Photo-Text Award.
