REVIEW: Sam Contis: Moving Landscape

Sam Contis is an acclaimed U.S. photographer whose work is shown for the first time in Australia at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In the exhibition Sam Contis: Moving Landscape, three series of artworks are considered in relation to the construction of inhabited landscapes as an experience of place, movement and duration.

Sam Contis, Clover 2019/2021, silver gelatin print 101.6 x 152.4 cm (image). Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis

Through a complex and nuanced investigation of movement and time, the photographic work of U.S. still-and-moving image artist Sam Contis, seductively unfolds across distinct landscapes. These populated terrains, as fragments, offer portals into worlds as different kinds of relationships to land, imbued with purpose and an experience of place. The images unpack the role that photography plays in picturing human and animal relationships in these sites of presence, denoted through action, labour and passage through the landscape.

Moving Landscape, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), is comprised of eighty-five works in the three series Cross Country, 2019 ̶ 21, Overpass, 2020 ̶ 22 and Deep Springs, 2017. This is a generous and perceptive curation of Contis’s work by Princeton University and AGWA Senior Research Fellow, Anna Arabindan-Kesson.

Arabinan-Kesson has highlighted the ways that Contis both eschews and teases traditions of representation, writing about Contis in an essay for Art and Archaeology, 2025, that “The works explore experiences of movement, restriction, physical duration, labor, geological change, sensuality and bodily autonomy: all themes that have deep significance in the current global, political and environmental conditions we are living through.”

When entering the gallery, we encounter a schoolgirl, Runner Stretching, leaning over one leg. We see the back of her head, bent down. As the exhibition continues, an unconventional view of the human body is repeated. Bodies are seen in fragments; a fleshy back, busy hands, heads obscured by hats or lying on the ground, faces unseen. From the outset, this perspective sets up an indirect but intimate relationship with the human subject that is not voyeuristic.

Contis’s series of photographs of schoolgirls training in Cross Country, is a homecoming of sorts, with Contis herself having joined the very same track team aged thirteen. Over several seasons, spanning four years, she photographed the girls training, racing, socialising, recovering and changing as they grew. Many of works are in tonal greys, interspersed with the occasional striking colour print, capturing the vivid blue or pink of a sweaty jersey. They convey a sense of time passing, capturing the exertion, exhaustion, movement, or imminent movement of their subjects, with a nod to the early motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey.

In Overpass the focus turns to agricultural farmlands. From walks through Northern England, Contis considers landscapes of toil, containment and passage. The built feature of the stile recurs as a structure that allows humans, but not their animals, to pass over or through barriers such as fences. The stile manifests as wooden and stone structures, or small gaps in stone walls, known as “squeeze stiles.” Overpass questions the meanings of walking through the landscapes, and how humans and their domesticated animals have shaped the natural environment, by teasing out the tensions between freedom of movement and restriction or enclosure.

­­In other works, the subject of movement is made explicit to the point of the content becoming indistinguishable, lost in a blur, with only g­­limpses of trees, foliage or hair recognisable. In Dust in the Road, 2014, a road follows a looming mountain range and disappears into a cloud of dust in the distance. Contis plays with the cinematic cliché of a hero or villain disappearing into a dust cloud, where the viewer is left questioning the cause of the disruption in the otherwise still landscape.

Sam Contis, Dust in the Road, 2014 silver gelatin print 86.4 x 106.7 cm (image) Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis

With works such as this, in the Deep Springs series, Contis delves into the frontier landscape of Nevada and California. Deep Springs was a Nunnian microcollege of less than thirty male students up until 2017, when women were finally admitted. Presented is a scenography of place and gender in the Wild West. Contis approaches the wide-open desert vastness with sensitivity and intimacy towards its inhabitants. Expansive scenes of cowboys on horseback, dwarfed by the landscape, contrast with close-ups of hat-obscured faces, fly-strewn shirts and raw flesh. Throughout, there are hints as to the nature of the men pictured. The washing line with clothing pieces scattered to the ground in Laundry Line—April, 2014, suggests an absence of domesticity while the splashes of blood suggest violence, but there’s also a sensitivity to the subject matter and a gentle camaraderie evident, which runs in contrast to the tough brutality.

Sam Contis, Laundry Line, March 2023, archival pigment print 121.9 x 152.4 cm (image). Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis Sam

Moving Landscape is a prescient exhibition to view in Western Australia, on Noongar Country, given the fraught colonial histories of this continent as landscapes of toil and displacement for First Nations peoples. Indigenous peoples have a long history of managing the land, practicing forms of agriculture and containment in these sites of passage. Cowboys in the U.S., are just as likely to be First Nations, as are the skilled stockmen working Australian cattle and sheep stations in remote regions today.

Moving through this exhibition is akin to moving through cinematic landscapes. Like the Brazilian social documentary photographer, Sebastião Salgado, Contis’s images unfold to reveal close relationships with the subjects pictured. Salgado placed himself in situations of human conflict and displacement, and in a not dissimilar way Contis’s photographs are about “embodied experiences, attending to the porosity of individual and environment, internal sensation and external environment,” as it states in the jointly authored catalogue. In addition to this generous intimacy with the subject matter, the images critically address the traditions of photography and how ideas of landscape, body and gender have been perpetuated.

This article was first publishing in Artist Profile Issue 72.  Images courtesy of the Artist and The Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth

Dr Laetitia Wilson is a curator and writer working on Whadjuk Noongar lands.

EXHIBITION
Sam Contis: Moving Landscape
31 May – 9 November 2025
Art Gallery of Western Australia