For his newest photograph e book, Benjamin Rasmussen spent over eight years capturing folks throughout 43 American states. The result’s a meticulous deconstruction of American id and citizenship
For US-based photographer Benjamin Rasmussen, ‘house’ has at all times proved an elusive idea. Born to an American mom and a Faroese father, Rasmussen spent the primary 18 years of his life within the distant southern islands of the Philippines earlier than uprooting to the US for school. His newest monograph, The Good Citizen, is a fruits of years spent questioning his personal id and the privilege that accompanied it. Having now settled within the US, the e book supplied a chance to interrogate what it means to be American and, in his personal phrases, “attempt to perceive among the ethical complexity that’s a part of it.”
True to his declare, The Good Citizen is a meticulous deconstruction of American citizenship. Combining archive pictures together with his personal, Rasmussen’s investigation spanned eight years and 43 states, throughout which he met with over 500 folks. The ensuing 5 chapters resemble a complete case file, embracing disparate nuances inside American id and revealing a fancy family tree that connects its modern manifestations with their origins. Within the first of 5 themed chapters titled, Violence (others embrace Exclusion, Archetype, Magnificence and Whiteness and Surveillance), Rasmussen cites the notorious Dred Scott determination for example of how citizenship has been weaponised by the American state since its inception. This landmark 1857 Supreme Court docket case maintained that the rights of the structure didn’t apply to the enslaved Scott, and by extension, to anybody with African heritage. Whereas researching the case, Rasmussen journeyed to Ferguson, Missouri, within the wake of Michael Brown’s capturing by police, solely to find that Scott was buried a couple of miles down the highway.
“That was the start line for me,” says Rasmussen. “The second I realised how interconnected all these items was and that it could not match into one field.” The extra he seemed, the extra clearly he noticed American citizenship for what it was – a fastidiously constructed system whose mechanics had been so seamlessly embedded inside American life they remained barely perceptible. “I wished to analyze that de jure construction that has allowed my expertise [as a white American citizen] to be so completely different from all these those who I do know,” says Rasmussen. “Americanism has grown from one thing very exclusionary, however these facets of whiteness and energy stay largely invisible.”
In figuring out these techniques, Rasmussen untangles the convoluted authorized infrastructure behind American citizenship whereas documenting the experiences of these caught up in its internal workings. In Magnificence and Whiteness, for instance, he juxtaposes portraits of magnificence queens throughout America with color playing cards previously used to find out pores and skin tone in courtroom, in addition to an inventory of each racial prerequisite case within the US that had tried to outline who was white and subsequently eligible for naturalisation. In Exclusion in the meantime, testimonies of Japanese People positioned in focus camps throughout World Struggle II seem subsequent to a portrait of Phi ‘Tommy’ Pham, a inexperienced card holder who confronted deportation in 2021 after serving a jail sentence with out being naturalised.
As in his earlier initiatives – By The Olive Bushes (2013) and Marshall Fireplace (2022) – Rasmussen’s use of textual content and located objects elevates this investigation with haunting poignancy. Within the ultimate chapter, Surveillance, pictures of discarded water jugs and camouflage clothes discovered alongside the US-Mexico border crossing supply a robust invitation for the viewer to type their very own conclusion on the lives of these to whom they as soon as belonged. Like the remainder of the e book, Rasmussen isn’t fascinated by offering neat solutions, however moderately in frightening additional scrutiny and questions. “I need folks to understand how skinny the road between the previous and the current is,” he says. “I feel to be a member of a society is to decide on to have interaction with these complexities.”
The Good Citizen by Benjamin Rasmussen is revealed by Gost Books and is out now.
