Bodies in proximity, hands engaged in work or in an embrace. Physical actions and relationships populate Contis’s series Deep Springs. The series takes its name from its setting: a historically all-male liberal arts college situated in
the remote high desert of California. Contis’s subjects are pictured in their early college years, a time of coming into one’s adult self. As the artist has pointed out, the West has “always been thought of as a place where one can try on new identities, reinvent or discover oneself. And photography has always been used as a tool to construct new ideas about place and self, especially in the west.”

Gallery label from

Being: New Photography, 2018

Medium Inkjet print
Dimensions 31 5/8 × 41 11/16" (80.3 × 105.9 cm)
Credit Acquired through the generosity of Thomas and Susan Dunn
Object number 5.2018
Department Photography

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Sam Contis

Sam Contis

American, born 1982 6 works online

Artist Sam Contis first visited Deep Springs College—a small, historically all-male college in the high desert of California—in 2012; for the next five years, she photographed its students and landscape .

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