DEEP SPRINGS by Sam Contis

Mack Books, 2017, First edition, 152 pp., , 9 3/4" X 11 1/2", Hardcover Near fine (Slight bump to top corners of front and rear boards) The images in Sam Contis's Deep Springs were made in a remote desert valley east of the Sierra Nevada. The work centres on a small, all-male liberal arts college, founded in 1917 by the educational pioneer L. L. Nunn. The college and its surroundings provide a stage on which Contis explores the construction of myth, place, and masculine identity. Bringing together new photographs with pictures made by the first students at the college 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.