In photos: a perilous portrait of America spiralling into fascism

As a former civil rights lawyer working with innocent DNA exonerees, Debi Cornwall spent 12 years seeking justice from the very system that betrayed its own citizens.

“I marshalled evidence and connected all the dots so that there's only one logical conclusion you could draw,” she says. But as a photographer, Cornwall avoided a didactic approach, preferring to question and critique empire, 21st century American style.

The story begins in 2014-15, when Cornwall traveled to “Gitmo,” the U.S. Naval Station in Cuba to create Welcome to Camp America, Inside Guantánamo Bay, a surreal portrait inside the notorious prison home to CIA-run torture programs under the George W. Bush regime.

Recognising the interplay between militarisation and myth, Cornwall journeyed to the heart of empire for her second book, Necessary Fictions. She visited 10 U.S. military training grounds, photographing American soldiers engaged in war games with Iraqi and Afghan actors hired to portray both civilians and resistance.

Now Cornwall returns with Model Citizens (Radius Books), completing the trilogy with an unnerving exposé of the banality of evil that hides in plain sight, filtered endlessly through media and entertainment. Weaving together fragmented scenes made from 2018–2023 at MAGA rallies, local museums, and during US Border Patrol Academy training scenarios, Cornwall creates a perilous portrait of a nation spiralling into fascism.

“While making Model Citizens, something clicked. What I was seeing was being staged: Americans as heroic victors or innocent victims,” she says. “The U.S. is always ‘the good guy’ in our story, our history, and ourselves in the world, but we’re not just passive consumers of state propaganda. We are choosing our political and social communities, and those are kinds of performances.”

In a country where bot farms, influencers, and trolls shape contemporary discourse, political theatre riddles every corner of American life. With Model Citizens, Cornwall crafts an unnerving meditation of collective delusion inside the imperial core.

Pointing to a photograph of museum figure of a life size soldier with sweat beading on his furrowed brow, Cornwall crosses into the uncanny valley, where everything is “lifelike” but nothing is real, most of all the fictions and fantasies of the US empire as “good cop.”

Born of violence at the heart of the Age of Enlightenment that advances Western cultural hegemony through colonialism, genocide, and slavery, the United States rose to global prominence projecting moral authority under the guise of human rights it reserved for the white landowning patriarchy.

Everyone else has had to scrape and claw their way to constitutional amendments and Supreme Court decisions that have proved tenuous at best, only to have their rights used to jockey for votes in order to “save democracy.”

It is here that post-truth malaise reigns supreme, its reach only growing as AI explodes, cultivating an American predilection for solipsism. Cornwall reveals, “For me, the antidote is to make pictures of real things happening in the world that invite people to think twice.”

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