Welcome to Camp America
A startling new book about human rights atrocities at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay—and an interview with the photographer who brought these stories to light.
‘The book is like a dossier, a file of criminal evidence, interviews, interrogations, testimonies, reports, photos’
This is a photo story shot by, Debi Cornwall. The story documents human rights atrocities at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay. The series shows images from inside the camp, but it also hold various other medias to make it more interesting and add more depth to the story. Using reports, interviews and interrogations as well as photography makes the photo story more real and a more valid document.
Interview about the book:
Who do you see as the audience or readers of this book?
DC: Welcome to Camp America should be of interest to any concerned citizen. It’s about Guantánamo Bay but the issues it confronts are not unique to the United States. I’ve exhibited and lectured about this work in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, China and Korea, and each time audiences find this work relevant to issues facing them at home. The questions the book is posing–who do we want to be in the era of the “War on Terror,” and what are we doing to ourselves—are unfortunately, universal.
How do you want people to respond to the book? Do you see this as a call to action and activism, or is it more about raising awareness?
DC: When I first showed this work at Photoville in 2015, a woman confronted me outside my exhibit. “What’s the point of this?” she demanded. “It’s about inviting us to look at Guantánamo Bay,” I said. “Why should we look? I just wish we could kill them all,” she said, and walked away. It was a powerful moment. What I heard was pain. At some point, though, can we hold our grief and also look at the reality of actions taken in our names? What will become of us if we cannot bring ourselves to look? The book is an invitation to look.
It’s a complicated story, with many different points of approach. Can you talk a bit about your decisions that helped you arrive at the final design and layout for the book?
DC: Camp America builds meaning with many elements: three series of photographs, archival material, and text–excerpts of a sworn statement from an actual court case. With such a layered project, the choice of a designer makes all the difference. David Chickey, co-founder of Radius Books and Camp America’s designer, knew that the design had to advance the concept. We worked on it together closely.
I wanted the book to be an intimate, personal size, and lay flat for ease of reading. So the trim size and perfect binding came first. The images and texts would alternate, paced to build suspense, and giving readers the option to choose a visual or a textual experience, or both.
I found once-classified government materials documenting the bureaucratization of violence, which had been carried out for years in secret. I wanted to find a design element that made the reader aware of choosing whether to look. We settled on the foldover: you see a peek of official writing, and understand more is hidden under the fold. You may well turn past it, but you’re going to be aware of the choice you make. Do I want to take what is given? Or do I want to dig deeper?
The 14 folio inserts, one for each released detainee placed by hand throughout the book, were David’s brilliant idea. My immediate response was “We can’t do that. Unbound pages might get creased, or end up out of order, or get lost.” But I realized in the very next moment that the built-in arbitrariness of this design concept was a perfect metaphor for what has happened to these men.
Jodie Tovey PJD blog 