Debi Cornwall has had a remarkable journey from a twelve-year career as a civil-rights lawyer to an acclaimed visual artist. Her meticulous research and negotiation skills, honed through her legal background, now enrich her visual practice. I had the privilege of being her student at the International Center of Photography in 2023, where her innovative approach to conceptual documentary profoundly influenced my own path. Recently, we both exhibited work at the Rencontres photographiques d’Arles.

Debi had a large solo show, “Model Citizens,” at the Espace Monoprix, after winning the 2023 Prix Elysée. Over the last decade, she has been looking at how state power is performed, consumed, and normalized through three kinds of venues across the United States: Immersive, realistic military training scenarios and cultural role players as part of the US border patrol Academy (1), war museums, staging Americans as heroic victors or innocent victims (2), and “Save America” rallies dedicated to Donald Trump (3). Through her work, she asks: How do staging, performance and roleplay inform ideas about citizenship in a violent land whose people no longer agree on what is true?

At the same time, my project “Silent Radar” was being exhibited at LUMA, as part of the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents. Silent Radar tells the story of two transgender friends (Silent and Radar, after their avatar names) who spend most of their time on the virtual reality platform VR Chat. This story goes beyond tech or the notion of ‘digital future’, speaking rather to the ideas of identity and community. It confronts and blends the real and the non-real, the virtual and the tangible, the digital and the analog, and begs the questions: When both realms start to merge, how is the ‘self’ defined? And what does it tell us about our real, tangible, world?

This shared experience in Arles was an important marker for me, as we went on to discuss the significance of working in lineage.

Read the full interview on Lenscratch.

🗽 And not everyone lives in a big hub like New York, where opportunities to connect and find community are plenty. 

Early-career photographers have reached out as they look to break into the photojournalism industry… often frustrated by the lack of accountability that could keep them going, and not many options to get personalized feedback.

How do you get editors’ attention?

2 keys to that: 

🗝 Personal projects. Understanding how to build a well-thought-out visual story, and doing it ethically, with a meaningful & unique point of view. 

🗝 Community. People you can brainstorm and bounce ideas with, who can hold you accountable and keep you motivated.

Where are you in your storytelling journey? 

What helps you stay the course?

📸: Photo of myself & Andrew Lichtenstein, probably going back-and-forth over the 50th version of a sequence 🤠 

Especially in photography.

I’ve been captivated by the way visual storytelling expanded to include more conceptual approaches — be it image making, editing, or sequencing. 

A visual story can reflect a mood, extend a metaphor, or a poetic idea. It can respond to shapes, a time or a place. It can have human characters — or not. 

It can look at the past (archives) or the future (fiction?). 

It can imagine possibilities. 

It can ask questions.

🏖 In her book “Gold Coast,” Ying Ang photographs the paradox of a place experiencing both affluence and high crime. She challenges what people think a crime-filled place looks like. She asks why families choose to stay, and taps into unexpected visual languages. She plays with the metaphors of danger. She photographs the *idea* of crime scenes in a popular tourism hub.

🌪  In her following book “The Quickening” explores the transformational experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. She examines the process of moving further out into the world from birth, and “shrinking back in,” seeing your world contract during pregnancy. She also explores the medieval ways of collecting information through oral testimonies, due to lack of proper medical research and public knowledge about women’s health. The soft cover, poetic inserts, different layers (only the prologue is shot in medium format, distanced from the world as she did with ‘Gold Coast’), shows a deeply personal and inquisitive approach.

What’s your favorite conceptual work?