Since 2016, Debi Cornwall has traveled to ten military bases across the United States to photograph a place that does not exist. Atropia is the fictional country built for training exercises: mock-village landscapes where Afghan and Iraqi roleplayers, many of them refugees from the wars being rehearsed, perform versions of their past or future selves in service of the U.S. military. Soldiers pose before camouflage backdrops, wearing moulage—fake wounds applied by Hollywood makeup artists—as they prepare to deploy. Cornwall photographs the artifice of war, the meta-reality of a fantasy industrial complex, without pretending the camera stands outside it.
The photographs share the 324-page hardcover with writing chosen to extend rather than explain them. Critical theorist Sarah Sentilles contributes an essay; Makeda Best, curator of photography at Harvard Art Museums, writes; the poet Nomi Stone supplies poetry; the novelist Roy Scranton contributes fiction. Their presence matters. The book is not a portfolio with commentary appended but a structure in which image and text both interrogate the performance of American power and identity after 9/11. Radius Books has also published Cornwall’s Welcome to Camp America, Inside Guantánamo Bay, but the concerns here are domestic and dispersed rather than confined to a single institution.
For collectors of conceptual documentary, the difficulty of the subject is part of the attraction. The locations are described as featureless and dismal even at dawn and dusk, and the book refuses the single decisive frame. What it builds instead is a cumulative argument about the stories a military tells itself, staged in realistic scenarios and circulated as preparation. Cornwall’s earlier career as a civil rights lawyer informs an attention to how institutions script the people inside them, but the photographs do not pose as evidence in a case; they observe the conditions under which evidence is manufactured.
This is a serious body of work about representation, rehearsal, and state power, made over repeated visits and carried into book form with unusual care. For a collection engaged with contemporary American photography, the ethics of documentary, and the visual culture of the post-9/11 era, it deserves close attention.
