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.