Debi Cornwall and Amy Elkins, Interviewed by Conner Gordon

Incarceration is in many ways characterized by invisibility, a fact evident in the photographs of Debi Cornwall and Amy Elkins. In the past two years, both artists have published critically acclaimed photo books on imprisonment. In Cornwall’s Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay, invisibility is both implicit and explicit—implicit in the absences created by Guantánamo’s military censors who deleted any of Cornwall’s photos showing a face, and explicit in Cornwall’s adaptation of this “no faces” rule to portray the lingering trauma of Guantánamo’s former prisoners. In the layered images of Elkins’ Black is the Day, Black is the Night, invisibility manifests as erasure, as Elkins depicts imagined landscapes and obscured portraits warped by death row prisoners’ years behind bars.

The contexts they document may be different, but Cornwall and Elkins’ portrayals of incarceration both illustrate the dehumanization, surreality and trauma that mark imprisonment. And though their processes were shaped by incarceration’s invisibility, their photographs work to counter that same invisibility—to help make the realities of the imprisoned known.

CG: I’d like to start with your motivations in tackling a topic like incarceration from these two different perspectives. What was it that first inspired you to begin these projects?

DC: After stepping away from a 12-year career as a civil rights lawyer representing innocent DNA exonerees, I was looking for a photographic project that would address some of the same concerns, but from a new perspective, for a new audience. Over dinner with a friend who represented men held at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I had the idea to photograph released men. Much like my former clients, these men were navigating freedom in a changed world. But their struggles are much more complicated than my former clients’, as “Gitmo” releasees have no court orders proclaiming their innocence. The mere fact that they were held in Guantánamo will mark them as suspects forever. And many could not return home, but were instead transferred to foreign countries where they knew nobody and could not even speak the language.

AE: Over the years, I have had several family members get swept up in the prison system. I know that played a role in the making of Black is the Day, Black is the Night (BITDBITN). But it also stemmed out of my ongoing exploration of masculinity and, at the time, what I was trying to research further—the idea of hyper-masculinity. When I first stumbled across the penpal websites that led me to work on Black Is The Day Black Is The Night, I was working on a portrait project with Ivy League rugby players. | I had turned to Ivy League rugby because I was fascinated by how barbaric and violent the sport was, but how prestigious and wealthy the institutions that played were. I was fascinated by the dueling aspects of wealth, class, intellect, violence and athleticism.  

When I first came across a website where those on death row or serving life were seeking penpals, I was immediately struck by how invisible these men were in comparison to those I had been making portraits with on the rugby pitch. Both were drawn to impulses of violence (some play, some real) but were living such starkly different lives, and had most likely come from starkly different backgrounds. I bookmarked the website and found myself drawn to it again and again, reading profile after profile of men living sometimes decades in isolation. This eventually led me to write several men, which in turn inspired me to make the work in BITDBITN.

DC: My original idea went nowhere. Understandably, none of the released men or their lawyers responded to my first inquiries. At that point, I was little more than a lawyer who liked to take pictures. So I took a different approach, and instead applied for clearance to photograph at Guantánamo itself.

The vast majority of my three years working on this project were spent on research and negotiation for access, not making photographs. It was a challenge even to find out which military authorities to ask for permission to photograph at Guantánamo. I also did visual research to see what kinds of photographs were already out there. The iconic photographs of orange jumpsuits and barbed wire had been repeated so often to have been drained of meaning. My strategy was to take a different kind of picture that would invite a fresh look. I visited Guantánamo three times, negotiating on my last visit to work with analog equipment, which involved its own extensive negotiation (and learning how to develop color film by hand in a motel bathroom).

Once my series from Guantánamo were published in The New York Times and picked up internationally, I had the credibility to go back and try to connect with released men for the final series, Beyond Gitmo. To find them, I read every every interview releasees had given, researched which lawyers had represented them, and reached out to both groups by email and social media. Over the course of nine months, I collaborated with 14 men in nine countries. It was three years, almost to the day, from my first visit to Guantánamo to holding an advance copy of the book in my hands at the opening of my first solo exhibition in 2017.

DC: The military authorities at Guantánamo regulate who may visit and what may be photographed. I signed 12 pages of rules as a condition of access. I would be escorted at all times while carrying a camera, and each image reviewed directly off the memory chip in daily “Operational Security Review.” The most challenging for me was the “no faces” rule: even partial profiles would be deleted.

Going in, I knew I was not going to be shown the daily reality for inmates at Guantánamo, what happens behind closed doors. My proposal was very general, asking to document daily life of both “detainees” and guards. This concept crystallized when, upon arrival for my first trip, the military escort said, “Gitmo is the best posting a soldier could have. There’s so much fun to be had here!” So I looked at what I was being asked to see. The series Gitmo at Home, Gitmo at Play was born.

The Naval Station’s gift shops offered another way to emphasize the the disconnect between the public face of Guantánamo and its secret reality. I bought a bucketful of souvenirs—including the “I ♥ Guantánamo Bay” toddler tee, the Fidel bobblehead doll—and photographed them for the second series, Gitmo on Sale.

AE: My entire project was limited by the very nature of old-fashioned, slow-paced letter writing. Not only was it limited by that, but also by the fact that I was writing letters to men on death row who were often in solitary confinement. Security was very tight. All letters coming and going were screened and sometimes confiscated. Some of the men had been in prison so long they no longer had family outside to help support them in any way. Meaning, with no financial assistance or means of earning income, some couldn’t afford postage stamps. Some would be sent to the hole and lose privileges like receiving/sending mail. Sometimes there were hunger strikes or lockdowns that would prevent mail delivery. All of these things happened sporadically and were out of all of our hands. Some men would write every month on a certain day, while others would fall in and out of touch. The project had to remain flexible throughout to make it even possible.

CG: Both of your projects focus on otherwise everyday scenes or objects that are transformed by incarceration. Debi, in your case, I see this in the photos of everyday leisure scenes and gift shop objects. Amy, I find this in your composite landscapes. Could you comment on the role of the everyday/mundane in your work, and why you decided to work with it?

DC: What does daily life look like in a place where nobody has chosen to live? I traveled to Guantánamo thinking of it as a state of exception, a departure from American norms, values and laws. But when I arrived, Guantánamo’s ordinary American-ness was striking. Focusing on that, I realized, might raise different kinds of questions.

AE: The composite landscapes have so much more meaning to me than the everyday mundane, but are certainly transformed by incarceration. They are fictional spaces created through highly personal descriptions of places these men would often never see again. To me, these spaces hold such heaviness and sorrow.  

DC: In talking to each released man, I made it clear that this project was a primarily visual artistic collaboration, not a journalistic essay. As I did not want to re-traumatize anyone by asking about torture, I would not be interviewing them formally about what they went through at Guantánamo, though I was of course open to talking about it if they wanted to. My focus instead was working with them to make a photograph that reflected their experience of life after Guantánamo. Rather than approaching them as victims, suspects, or objects of inquiry, we related as peers. Each of the 14 men I worked with immediately grasped the “no faces” concept and wanted to be a part of something larger than himself, a project that might bring awareness about their struggles, as well as those of the “brothers” left behind without charge or trial, still held at Guantánamo.

AE: All of this is challenging in various ways. In order to make the work in BITDBITN, I wrote with seven men over the course of five years, five of which were on death row, two of which were serving life and went in as juveniles. Of the five on death row, two were executed while working on the project. One man I wrote with served 21 years in a solitary confinement cell with no windows. They all shared stories of their previous lives outside, some shared stories about their crimes, some maintained their innocence. Some wrote short stories or poetry. Some shared stories of their parents passing away while they were incarcerated. Some shared fears of being forgotten. These were the realities of the project I chose to work on.

I felt a huge responsibility. At times it was too hard to work on, and I took breaks when needed. I think I chose to create the composite landscapes and the pixelated portraits to make something beautiful out of something too hard for most people to want to look at. But in the same breath, those composited landscapes were sent to my penpals, who found escape in them.

DC: Visually, I wanted to convey something I had learned in working with released men within the United States: it’s not over when the body is freed. The pain and the trauma persist, sometimes literally embodied. So I photographed each man as though he were still at Guantánamo, replicating, in the free world, the military’s “no faces” rule. This strategy also protected their privacy. We collaborated to find locations of relevance to their lives. For those transferred to third countries, like the Chinese Uighurs in Albania, or the Yemeni and Tunisian in Slovakia, we sought out locations emphasizing disorientation. While each portrait offers a glimpse of the struggles these men face, I also wanted to transcend individual cases and speak to the systemic denial of personhood in our post-9/11 “War on Terror” policies.

AE: The pixelated portraits in BITDBITN serve two purposes. One, I truly did feel protective in regards to the privacy or the men I wrote with, and pixelating them was a way of giving them that privacy. But conceptually, the reason I made them obscured was that all of the men I wrote with spoke about how much prison had changed them and how they struggled to maintain a sense of identity. I thought about how long-term incarceration, especially in solitary confinement, couldn’t help but create memory and identity collapse. The portraits were distorted based off of how old each of the men were, and how much of that time they had spent incarcerated. 

CG: What responsibility do you think photographers have to engage with social issues, if any?

DC: Photographers are drawn to make work for a million reasons, as it should be. My photographic work is part of a lifelong interest in power and its impact on individuals, relationships and communities.

AE: I don’t think photographers (or any type of artists) necessarily have a responsibility to engage with social issues. We all have concepts we obsess on or can’t turn away from. I have made work about masculinity for well over a decade that led me to make work about incarceration. And now I continue to make work about both, in hopes that larger conversations can be had about gender and the social constructs that shape it.

CG:Why choose photography for this type of project? Is photography a good medium to talk about social issues and activism?

DC: For me, photographs are one means of communication among many. More and more, I find myself juxtaposing photographs with texts, documents and other archival materials, and, in exhibitions, sound. I want to place the visual work in context and offer audiences a range of ways into the material. In this divided cultural moment, we ignore arguments we disagree with, but we cannot unsee. No matter what you think of an issue, a surprising photograph can spark a visceral response, curiosity. And that’s the beginning of a conversation.

AE: Photography and writing are honestly the most natural ways I’ve come to express myself over the years, and I can’t fathom any other approach. I find both to be such powerful tools.