CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/11/2020

Debi Cornwall's 'Necessary Fictions' examines the secret world of American military roleplay

"Insurgent" is reproduced from Necessary Fictions, Debi Cornwall's new book of conceptual documentary photographs related to highly realistic role-playing exercises at American military training camps. A book that is provocative and fascinating in the revelatory strangeness of its subject alone, like all Radius books this is also a beautiful piece of photobook publishing, featuring copious supporting primary text materials, several deluxe papers, exquisite printing, a bound-in booklet containing transcript from a 2009 training exercise gone awry, and an envelope containing studio portraits of soldiers dressed for their roles as injured or deceased combatants. We learn that contemporary combat training includes not only exposure to "the visual stimulation of MST prosthetics," but scent oils that "simulate scents in the most unpleasant of scenarios." These include Decaying Flesh, Dead Body, Feces, Gunpowder, Burnt Flesh, Vomit, Urine and Car Bomb. Islamic prayer beads for Ramadan are sourced; authentic meals are cooked by Iraqi role-players; realistic remains are identified. "Cornwall's photographs demonstrate the paradox of this fictional mode," Makeda Best writes: "the photographs are not 'authentic' documents, but they are documents. They are documents of the fictions of this ongoing conflict and the fiction of photography as something that could tell us the truth about war."