Deep Springs

The images in Sam Contis's 'Deep Springs' were made in a remote valley just east of the Sierra Nevada and north of Death Valley. The work centres on a small, all-male liberal arts college, founded in 1917 as a site of alternative education. There, amid the wide expanse of mountainous desert, academic study is, to this day, combined with manual labour on the school's cattle ranch and farm. The college and its surroundings provide a stage on which Contis is able to explore broader themes of the construction of myth, place, and masculine identity. Bringing together her own photographs with archival pictures made at the college nearly a century ago, 'Deep Springs' engages with the enduring image of the American West, one that Hollywood, mass media, and the history of American photography have imprinted into the collective psyche.