The Good Citizen

The book is divided into five chapters—Violence, Exclusion, Archetype, Beauty and Whiteness and Surveillance. The portraits in the book were simultaneously shot on polaroid and a large format camera. It was Rasmussen’s intent to be collaborative—and the instantaneous nature of the polaroid print allowed those who were depicted to be part of a conversation about how they were represented.

The project’s focus moves from an attempted attack on a community of Somali Muslims in Kansas to an evening with the then President Donald Trump in the White House Residence. From the experiences of the people forced into Japanese-American internment camps in Colorado during World War II to a thriving community of Iraqi Yazidis who moved to Nebraska after serving as US interpreters. From those protesting the killing of Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to a search for the perpetrators of a mass lynching in 1946 in Georgia.

Photographs of the winners of beauty pageants in immigrant communities are shown in contrast to the “white” requirement of US naturalization law that existed until the 1950s. The legacy of settler colonialism is shown through photographs of descendants of Tom White Shirt, an Arapahoe boy who survived the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. The project explores how US border policy has pushed migrants into deadly desert crossings, and how the children of immigrants assimilate their thoughts and dreams through language of both their families and their communities.