Debi Cornwall

Welcome to Camp America is Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights attorney Debi Cornwall’s vivid and disorienting glimpse into the US Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—known as “Gitmo”—through photographs, once-classified government documents and first-person accounts.

The book gathers three series: Gitmo at Home, Gitmo at Play showing residential and leisure spaces of both prisoners and guards; Gitmo on Sale, depicting the commodification of American military power through gift-shop souvenirs; and Beyond Gitmo, investigating life after detention with 14 men once held as accused terrorists, now cleared and freed, living in nine countries from Albania to Qatar. Environmental portraits in the free world replicate conditions of military regulation photography at Guantánamo Bay: no faces are shown.

With unique construction in English and Arabic, the book seeks common ground while asking provocative questions about compromises made between humanity and fear in the post-9/11 era.