photographer Benjamin Rasmussen He grew up in the Philippines with an American mother and a Faroese father before settling in the United States and obtaining American citizenship. his new book good citizen,Issuer Ghostthe result of more than a decade of research into American citizenship and its violent and exclusionary history.

Created in collaboration with Frank Wuis a jurist and historian who responded to and directed Rasmussen’s research conducted in 43 states.

Wu’s text consists of five chapters in this book (Violence, Exclusion, Archetypes, Beauty and Whiteness, and Surveillance), with historical and legal context layered over new archival images. The book covers a dizzying range of subjects, including contemporary Yazidi and Somali communities in America, the internment of Japanese Americans, border patrols, lynchings, beauty pageants, police violence, and the 1864 Arapaho Massacre. We talk to Rasmussen about citizenship in the context of America and whether he has any hope for the road ahead after a decade of diving into this country’s harrowing civic history. Did.

VICE: What events in your own life or news inspired you to start this project?
Benjamin Rasmussen: I spent most of my twenties concerned with refugee and IDP issues. [internally displaced person]At one point the editor posed the question, “When do immigrants and refugees become citizens?” I realized that I had never asked such a question about my own experience or the situation in America. I started trying to understand how citizenship works in America.

The book begins with the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved man who sued for his freedom. What really got me interested was that the Supreme Court said he was ineligible to sue because he couldn’t be a citizen as a black man. Michael Brown killed by Ferguson, Missouri, by a police officer. People were flocking to the streets of Ferguson, especially West Florissan Avenue. Five miles south of his Avenue in West Florissant is where Dredscott is buried.

It clicked: American History So short. There are these direct physical connections between the past and the present. Media reports about Ferguson were of “riots and buildings being burned.” For me it didn’t help me understand why these things were happening. I was more interested in what led to the creation of this community that is now rocked by these events?

It has led to years of research and figuring out how to trace history to the present, how to look back while photographing the ripple effects of American history on life and policy today.

It must have been a challenging project to undertake as a newly identified American.
The American side of my family has a relatively dark history and past. It’s as if you have to acknowledge pain and destruction in order to exist fully in the good. Trauma has shaped so many people’s experiences in America.

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of the “whiteness and beauty” chapter? To what extent is the concept of white beauty central to the book’s broader premise?
One of the first laws passed in the United States was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited naturalization to free whites. The law existed well into the 1950s, with minor changes in the 13th and 14th Amendments.

Popular culture often makes very vague references to white supremacy and that being white is key to the de facto fabric of America. de facto American structure, that Legal structure. It is embedded in laws and statutes. They are very well defined and legally absolute.

In that context, I became very interested in the ‘preconditions’ that persisted from the late 1870s through the 1950s and how legal terminology worked. This is a case in which a person who immigrated from another country applied for naturalization and was rejected because he was not white. I mean, not being citizens, they couldn’t sue to change the law…they had to sue to be considered white.

Suddenly the court had to decide what a white man was. This is happening in tandem with changes in the fields of science and anthropology, with people recognizing that race is a social construct rather than a biological absolute. They’re all complex and in many ways boring information, but how citizenship is constructed and works and how white people are at the core of this complex toxic soup of exclusive aspects of American identity. is very important in understanding the

So how do we talk about these things so as not to lose everyone? I came across these beauty pageants held in immigrant communities. They were a celebration of origins and American identity at the same time. I have photographed not only communities where people complained about being white, but also white immigrant communities from Eastern Europe and contests within the African diaspora. It was a way of engaging with this very complex history of legality in a visual way that celebrates modern community.

The Surveillance chapter is about America’s southern border. Can you explain how this border affects the idea of ​​American citizenship and identity?
i was working on Story About Anduril, the company that manufactures these automated watchtowers used on the U.S.-Mexico border. I started by taking pictures of watchtowers, and that was the starting point for looking at American border policy. How do we quantify the gaze of nations and how do we photograph how national borders work?

I began to look at the policy of “prevention through deterrence.” Basically the idea is to make it very difficult to cross the border in a safe place, thereby sending immigrants to a dangerous place. It’s based on the easy idea that people won’t come, but… Jason de LeonAnthropologists who work on desert border crossings call this the natural surrender of the violence inflicted on the human body by the state.

There is this interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, we hand over state violence to nature, and on the other hand, we hand over the actual perception of people’s humanity and intentions to AI algorithms running in-camera…

Much of this work has been done in Trumpist America, but most of this works across parties and administrations. Prevention through deterrence began under the Clinton administration and has continued under every administration since. Throughout this book, I have tried not to say this. these are Guys, they are assholes! It’s not that easy.

Do you think the book celebrates people’s ability to overcome these structures, or condemns the idea of ​​civil rights?
I had to recognize complexity and the multiple faces of good, bad and ugly that exist within [America]In its darkest hours, when I was dealing with the most painful aspects of American history, it felt like a condemnation, but other parts of the book’s making felt more like a celebration.

The book concludes with portraits of students and quotes about how they use language in terms of home life, school life, and dream life. For me, the hope of this book lies in the idea that society will become: more complicated.

The structure of America is built around things that need to be remembered and condemned, but nevertheless there are features in American society that seem really beautiful and the way they actually work. there is. But I feel that unless we remember that it is exclusive and how it is embedded in power structures, American society tends to retreat.