Sam Contis photographed Deep Springs in a secluded desert valley east of the Sierra Nevada and north of Death Valley. At its center is a small all-male liberal arts college, founded in 1917 around an educational model that joins academic study to work on a cattle ranch and farm. The setting is both geographically isolated and culturally charged: an institution where learning, labor, community, and the landscape are deliberately made inseparable.

Contis does not treat the college as a subject for straightforward documentation. Its students, bodies, animals, cultivated ground, and mountainous surroundings become elements in an inquiry into how masculine identity is formed and pictured. The work moves between physical intimacy and the scale of the desert, allowing gestures and surfaces to carry as much weight as the familiar grandeur associated with the West.

The book’s decisive method is its combination of Contis’s photographs with archival images made at the college nearly a century earlier. This temporal exchange complicates any simple distinction between observation and inheritance. Historical pictures do not merely supply background; placed beside contemporary photographs, they expose the persistence of poses, ideals, and visual conventions through which youth, independence, work, and male fellowship have been imagined.

Published by MACK in 2017 as a 152-page hardcover, Deep Springs addresses the American West as both an actual place and a collectively produced image—one shaped by Hollywood, mass media, and photographic history. For collectors, its importance lies in this carefully constructed dialogue between bodies, land, institutional history, and archive. Rather than repeating Western mythology or simply overturning it, Contis examines how that mythology remains active within photographs, and how sequencing can make its contradictions visible.