Deep Springs – Sam Contis

Located on an isolated desert ranch, east of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, Deep Springs is an all-male, liberal arts college founded a century ago by Lucien Lucius Nunn. The entrepreneur, who with his brother built the power station at Niagara Falls, devoted the last two decades of his life to what The New Yorker describes as “a novel form of education, an anomalous admixture of Christian mysticism, imperialist élitism, Boy Scout-like abstinence, and Progressive era learning-by-doing, with an emphasis on self-governance, leadership training, and the formation of strong character”.

None of this is mentioned in Deep Springs, for which Sam Contis spent four years on and off photographing at the college, having met a couple of former students while she was studying for her MFA at Yale University. But it provides the ideal stage for her investigation into shifting perspectives of masculinity, set against the backdrop of the American West, toying with its mythologies and long history of photography in the region, particularly that which plays on the relationship between the landscape and the human form.