Oil
2014 - Photography (Photography)
38.1 x 30.48 cm
Sam Contis
Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Oil is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Oil features a hand in front of an open hood of a car, checking the oil. The person’s fingers are slick with oil, and the lighting is dramatically contrasted, so that every detail of the hand is perceptible, while the car engine in the background is barely discernible. Contis’s images capture the beauty of the high desert in macro and microscopic views. The resonance of earth and body and the sensual echoes of human and animal give her photographs an Ovidian sense of imminent metamorphoses. Contributing to this sensation of superabundant possibility is the mythic potency of the American West. For some, the West symbolizes freedom and self-determination even as it has defined a rough, and often violent ideal, of masculine identity. Deep Springs can seem, in many ways, to be an embodiment of these ideals. Contis’s photographs allude to another side of both the historical and present reality; that is, an experience of gender that is more nuanced and ambiguous. In the early days of the American West, when women were few and far between, it was not uncommon for men to take on traditionally female roles. Similarly, at Deep Springs, gender identity has always been open to fluid expression. Though this suite of images represents the violence and sensuality at the heart of her project, coursing through Contis’s photographs is a powerful countercurrent of tenderness.
Throughout Sam Contis’s work is an unobtrusive tenderness, a submerged savagery, and an elusive, but insistent sensuality. While Contis’s photographs reflect the history of photography, they also examine a more thorny and contemporary issue: the development of masculine identity. Her recent projects demonstrate, if there was ever any doubt, that old-fashioned photography in the hands of an artist can feel completely contemporary.
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