Help us continue to showcase great photography in Sydney.
Join us as we bring great photography by emerging and established photographers that explores ideas and our world through an annual festival of exhibitions, workshops and conversations led by Australian and international artists and thought-leaders. Head On Photo Festival is presented by the not-for-profit Head On Foundation.
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This exhibition provokes inquiry about the human impact of the "Global War on Terror." January 11, 2018 marked the 16th anniversary of the first “War on Terror” prison's opening at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (known as Gitmo after its military call letters, GTMO). Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay plumbs the familiar in this state of exception, through three bodies of work:
1. Gitmo at Home, Gitmo at Play, residential and leisure spaces of prisoners & guards in a place where nobody has chosen to live, and where military authorities forbid photographs of faces;
2. Gitmo on Sale, investigating the commodification of American power, by way of gift-shop souvenirs; and
3. Beyond Gitmo, environmental portraits of 14 ex-detainees after they were cleared and released to nine countries, from Albania to Qatar. Some returned home. But others who could not were transferred to third countries where they know nobody and may not even speak the language. Each collaborative portrait replicates, in the free world, the military’s conditions for making photographs at Gitmo: no faces are shown.
Debi will be giving an Artist talk 1:30 pm 11 May at the Festival Hub Paddington Town Hall.
Debi Cornwall is a conceptual documentary artist who returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Her work explores power and identity in the post-September-11 era. She has exhibited in Switzerland, France, China, Korea, and the United States. She is a 2016 Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer nominee, Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award winner, and a 2017-2017 Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow. Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius, 2017) was a 2018 ICP Infinity Award nominee, and shortlisted for the 2017 Paris Photo-Aperture First Book Award and les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles Photo-Text Book Award.
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“The blanket of colonisation has been woven on violence and oppression has denied us all a kind truth. The impact of broken culture and languages and spiritual practices has left a deafening silence around violence in our intimate relationships causing violent assaults and sexual abuse.
Kindness is a movement. Sharing it is accessing your basic human right to personal and communal safely. We need to own our stories and come together to appreciate each other and listen. Violence hurts, it hurts society, its hurts families and it hurts you and I.
My Grandmothers were stolen from their families and enslaved, their culture and language denied. As a young person who witnessed family violence, I would never have believed I would be here today.
Understand that someone may not be ready to leave, and be kind and understand, don’t carry judgement or resentment of someone else’s journey. Give them a place to speak openly without being afraid or judged.
I said to my good friend, ‘I can’t live in this oppressive state of mind and not do nothing about the violence we are experiencing, personally and in society’. So begins the change when knowledge is learned and processed. Holding onto anger and resentment isn’t worth it.
No one person can be what you need to be or feel what you need to feel. Find safety within yourself.”
Dixie Link Gordon
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney
