Debi Cornwall’s Model Citizens examines the United States as a case study within a broader pattern: how staging, performance, and roleplay have come to shape ideas of citizenship in a violent, polarized country whose people no longer agree on what is true. Cornwall’s photographs move between US Border Patrol Academy training scenarios, “Save America” rallies, and history museums. These sites appear unrelated, but in sequence they reveal systems that reconcile, justify, or distract from the harsh realities of militarized life. The book completes a trilogy on the American condition, and its subject carries the weight of that cumulative inquiry.
The book’s structure is part of its argument. Images flow across French-fold page turns, and the design accentuates slippages between contexts. Adjacency becomes structural rather than atmospheric, echoing Cornwall’s larger question about what documentary photography can claim when realities have splintered. Published by Radius Books as a 204-page hardcover at 9 × 12 inches, Model Citizens contains 83 images. Texts are contributed by Nathalie Herschdorfer, Kris Paulsen, and Vanessa Codaccioni, whose essays accompany Cornwall’s photographs.
The project received the 2023 Prix Elysée, a biennial juried prize sponsored by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. The award included support for a concurrent publication in English and French; the French edition, Citoyens Modèles, was published by Éditions Textuel in 2024.
The book holds three American scenes—training ground, political rally, museum—within a single frame of inquiry. Each depends on performance and prepared narrative; together they show how citizenship is staged, taught, and consumed. Cornwall does not resolve the unease these juxtapositions produce. She lets the book’s physical structure carry it, page by page, so that attention to sequence and the turn of the page becomes part of how the work means. For collectors, the book’s significance is concrete: a sustained visual investigation, deliberate sequencing, and a design that makes the mechanics of the photobook inseparable from its subject.
