Essays
Sam Contis Asks What It Means to Move through the Landscape
In her photographs of England's stiles and centuries-old footpaths, the artist reflects on how we cross boundaries—and the ways we have shaped the natural world.
This essay originally appeared in Sam Contis: Overpass (Aperture, 2022) under the title “H.”
A desire line is a path made to cut corners. You’ll have seen them—in a field, tracing the most concise route between two gateways, or in an urban park in places where the paving winds the long way around the grass. Many people follow the same shortcut, and eventually a path becomes visible where the vegetation is worn away. Even when there is nobody there, you can see the physical traces of all those people and something they were aiming for, written plainly on the bared ground.
There are similar traces visible in Sam Contis’s photographs of stiles, tracks, and fences, images of human passage in which the human form is notably absent. A stile is a crossing point: a step or narrow gap in a fence, wall, or hedge, designed so that people can pass through but sheep and cattle can’t. It’s an old form: simple and variable. Anything that allows a person to pass over or through a barrier, but which is too narrow or fiddly for livestock, works. Two steps made of cobbles, breezeblocks, or pieces of wood nailed together; a slim gap let into a low stone wall; plastic sacking tied around a barbed-wire fence. All in and around these stiles there are traces of human activity, desire lines in an extended sense: people ’s desires and needs pressed into the places where they’ve been. There are trodden grasses and plants that have been crushed or bent around the worn paths. Cinder blocks, placed in front of one stile to help small legs make it up to the first step. A broken fence has been mended in a makeshift way, a short length of wire looped and twisted to hold a closure, it looks like a bad impression of a cobweb. Elsewhere, vertical posts are cut with a tapering droplet form at the top, narrowing to give the human hand something to hold. There’s a place where three empty lager cans have been dropped on the ground, below a stile at the meeting of a footpath and a road: not long ago, somebody sat on the fence here, drinking. They crumpled the cans and then they moved on.
Looking at these images, I thought of the histories of the English countryside told by Oliver Rackham, an ecologist whose books describe how layers of history materialize in a landscape. Rackham reads terrain as though it was an archive and he finds everything, everywhere crowded with evidence of past lives. Roads commemorate encounters, desires, and obstructions: the route bends here, where a farmer once dumped a pile of trash, and here where a group of kids lit a bonfire, and here, where a woman abandoned her dead horse. Travelers continued to pursue these diversions even after the obstruction was removed, so that the road, as it moved across a landscape, became a “series of wobbles,” each wobble the mark of an event. Barriers have stories too: there are hedges that stand as “the ghosts of woods that have been grubbed out,” a line of trees from the original edge making a lasting boundary between new fields. Perhaps every mark in any landscape is somehow a sign of drive, force, want, or need.
If we were to read the story of one of these stiles, in one of these images, what desires would it document? The stile seen here looks ordinary. A thin plank supported by two greenish posts: a single wooden step, bridging a fence between two sheep pastures in the north of England. A large, flat-faced cobble from the nearby river has been placed on the ground at one side to steady the feet. This stile is almost identical to the stile in the next field … but this one is messier, slightly asymmetrical, because this one began with a bad mood. It was the product of a poor repair job, knocked together one October day in 2004, a little past midday. The farmer who made it would, ordinarily, have been eating, but that day the telephone rang and he left his plate on the table, still half full. He talked, and listened, and the food cooled. It was his sister on the phone. She wanted to discuss their elderly mother’s care. They ended up arguing.
After the conversation, the farmer didn’t feel like finishing his meal. He left the house with his toolkit and went out across the fields to mend the broken stile. He took down the collapsed plank, and tested the posts to check that they were still sound. Then he knelt on the makeshift paving slab to hammer in the new step. One hand gripped the stile, the other pounded in the nails rapidly and hard. As he worked, he was running back over the argument in his mind, thinking of what he should have said to his sister, and the hammer went down on his thumb. Abruptly, he had to stop. Black blood pooled under the nail. He stood and stepped back, folding the fingers of his other hand protectively around the damaged thumb, to look at his work. The stile was unbalanced, the plank extending too far on one side, leaving only a narrow ledge on the other.
There had been stiles like this on his land for centuries, wherever people needed to pass. His parents and grandparents had tended to some, neglected others. Throughout the country are tens of thousands of miles of public footpaths, running across private land. Historically, landowners would see to the upkeep of stiles and gateways along these paths, when it was in their interests to do so. But relatively recently this upkeep was made a legal obligation. Since the Countryside Act of 1968, landowners have been required to maintain the stiles that made free movement possible, and this particular repair was long overdue. Over the years, the stile had taken many forms: its stakes and poles had been erected and knocked over; the stone slabs at its base used, worn, cracked, and carried away; the horizontal planks had been replaced many times.
The new plank that our farmer hammered in that day has its own story. It was Scots pine, swift-grown on timberland in western Scotland in the late 1990s. Tree by regularly spaced tree, the forest was being infiltrated by a poisonous fungus. The fungus didn’t look like much (fingernail-sized, pearly umbrellas growing on the ground below each sick tree), but it could rot live wood before the tree matured. Two square miles of pine were felled young to stop the spread and the timber from these trees, which couldn’t be sold through the usual channels, went cheap. Our farmer purchased green posts and thin planks from the lot, roughly cut and still wet.
But none of this explains the path. It doesn’t tell us why people were passing through right here, in this place—why they needed a crossing-point here, at this corner of this field, and why there was a stile that our farmer was now legally bound to maintain. We need to travel back again to make sense of it, to see the stories that caused it to materialize here.
Long before the 1968 Act, the English countryside was occupied and worked in common. Landowners held legal and political power, but commoners had the right to grow food, raise animals, or gather fuel from the fields and forests that they lived near. This was no Arcadia: landowners couldn’t have maintained their power without giving the peasants who worked for them some means to feed themselves. But the rights were real and honored. They were written down and lived out for centuries, during which peasants were able to make a living off their local land, right up to the point at which those rights were eroded and in some places eradicated between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, during a series of movements known as enclosures. Parish by parish, commoners were decisively deprived of this long-held tenancy of the landscape. Small plots farmed in rotation were ploughed up in favor of rationalized growing systems, with long straight hedgerows dividing large, regular fields. Straight roads, which ran from town to town, were expanded, and the tracks that mazed across fields, connecting every cottage or farmstead, woodland, or pond, faded into the grass. The pathway on which our stile stands was once a highway: a practical route rather than a recreational footpath. It had its deliveries and its commuters. Its placement, right here, made the neatest cut-through for the milkmaid in the early eighteenth century who used to take a pail from the dairy farm to the big house every other day; passing, in the other direction, children sent out by their parents to gather sticks for the fire. Already, then, this crossing had been in use for hundreds of years. Medieval peasants were here, going between their cottages and their strips of land, and occasional travelers exported materials across longer distances, moving stone and timber, lime and metals and chalk and charcoal, from forests and mines, to cities, building sites, shipyards. The crossing had been used for years, decades, centuries before that. Back when the lightly worn path was barely visible on the ground, humans walked here, taking hazels and hawthorn with them when they passed.
Perhaps, looking at the histories that materialize in this ordinary stile, we have to push its beginning even earlier. The environmental activist and writer George Monbiot, among others, has propagated a theory that the British landscape is one that evolved in response to threats that have long since disappeared. The blackthorn spines we see in our hedge evolved to deter rhinoceros tongues. Birch bark, glowing white with dark striations on the edge of this wood, would confuse an ancient elephant’s limited color vision. Monbiot mentions the hippopotamus bones discovered in central London, below Trafalgar Square, and pictures a vision of the whole of Britain as a place adapted to species that no longer live there, “a ghost ecosystem.”
Perhaps our stile began, then, before the human, and even before other mammals made the earliest desire paths here, into and out of the wood. Perhaps we need to explore the stories of the mycorrhiza, evolving in symbiosis with aquatic plant life, which enabled plants to colonize dry land, which enabled trees to emerge, which enabled our Scots pine, which created this green fencepost.
Or, looking at the river stone that’s used as a rudimentary step, we need to rewind to its moment of creation: boiling seas; molten rock in a volatile atmosphere; eons inside the earth’s crust, millennia on a mountainside, decades of rolling underwater before it was stranded on the riverbank during a late-summer drought when our farmer took it away.
But, no. None of that is early enough. We need to move back further. Thousands and millions and billions of years; the origins of life. Meteors were seeding the planet with lively microscopic forms. Electrified molecules were merging and splitting in a primordial soup. The precise sequence of events is uncertain. The only thing we can say for sure is that things were volatile. Something unstable stuck, and set into being this sequence of events that leads us here, to this crossing-point, in the present.
You can look at any landscape like that, seeing all these things that happened in this place in the past. They’re layered into every tiny area. A fencepost, a cobble, and a footprint in the mud, where ground has been worn bare below the stile, contains the story of last weekend’s rambler, and the evergreen that was cut down thirty years ago, and the primal molecule. You can look at a Peruvian mountainside, its trees and torn ruins, and see the signs of an industrious city. Or stand in Trafalgar Square to see ancient hippopotami wallowing where the waters used to meet. Or watch a harvester mechanically progressing through a soy crop in Kentucky and hear voices singing somewhere inside the field.
All these histories are live, shaping landscapes and affecting bodies in the present, and determining what’s possible in the future. Maybe this is a photography of speculation, rather than documentary, not an archive but a forecast: these images are not testaments to the past, they’re pictures of a future in which alternative forms of experience have a greater force and presence. The term stile comes from a diminutive form of an earlier word for “climb.” You look out with a slight deviation in your perspective. The landscape opens. You step up, placing your foot on the horizontal—the stone step, the wooden cross-beam—and then you see something else.
These images are not testaments to the past, they’re pictures of a future in which alternative forms of experience have a greater force and presence.
When you step down from the stile the ground comes up fast. There are these trippy images of movement, interspersed with the wide, still spaces. The perspective has been shifted, as though the subject is on the move. They give the feeling of descending to finding the ground slightly closer and harder than you’d expected, stumbling. All forms are dappled and blurred, meshed with light that moves unstably in water, earth, branches, or bark. These images are preoccupied with shadows and reflections, the places where branches and walls allow light to pass. Water rushes through the teeth of a barrier that catches flotsam. Barbed wire runs right up to the place where the fence can be crossed, then runs on at the side. Many of these pictures spell out the shape of the letter H: a horizon-line, seen between vertical strokes of trees or fences or walls. Planks, stones, wires, gates, stiles, fences, walls, all arrange a horizontal barrier or bridge that spans two uprights. I typed the lone letter into a search engine and discovered that my inference ran in the wrong direction: it’s not the landscape that recalls the letter, but the letter that depicts a landscape: “H” is derived from a Levantine hieroglyph for fence. A stile is a means of access but it is also a barrier technology, like a subway gate. It selects. It discriminates. It filters bodies.
Looking at these contemporary images, seen through fences and barriers, it’s difficult to ignore what the English landscape leaves out. If we were to follow the story of this stile horizontally, rather than vertically—not moving back through the past, but staying in the present and reaching out across the landscape and the world—what would we see? Starting right here, to watch a couple help one another over the stile one winter afternoon. They’re gray-haired, married, able-bodied, white; dressed, expensively, in Scandinavian waterproofs. Any time you go out for a hike in the English countryside, a gap opens up between the historical and legal fact of the right of access, and the political and geographical realities that determine who actually visits or inhabits any given landscape. The barriers that exist now, through which access to a landscape is granted or denied, have become more sinister because they are concealed. Ancient privileges and dispossessions have gone into hiding but they’re still around. Rural England is overwhelmingly white and right-leaning, and it’s poorly served by public transport. If you live in London or Manchester it’s easier and often cheaper to travel to Amsterdam or Mallorca, than to reach some closer part of rural East Anglia or the Lake District, without private transport. Barriers that sustain inequality in the contemporary world are no longer as simple as the wooden posts and lengths of wire that pen the sheep. Perhaps this is why there was a powerful dreaminess and longing in the way Trump used to fantasize about his wall. The thing that was remarkable, in the way he described it, was that his imagination was so literal—the height and dimensions, the building materials he would use, the itemized bills and who would pay them. The wall manifested a desire that ’s felt by many—not only those who wanted it—to go back into a world in which material force is the first currency, there are none of the receded or virtual barriers and passageways that shape realities now.
Sam Contis: Overpass
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Moving along the hedgerow and into the fields and woods, we track away from the couple and they disappear on the other side of the stile. A new set of subjects gains presence: small, shadowy, all nonhuman, some barely corporeal. The fencepost to one side of the stile is a growing pole for wild carrot plants, which lean on it as they move towards the light. The stile ’s wet, soft plank is food to the fungus that cover its surface in orange spots. The stake in the fence offers delicious relief for a cow’s itchy back on a hot afternoon. Moss and lichen creep over dank areas on a stone ’s surface. Spaces between loose stones in the wall are tunnels used by field mice and a weasel. A kestrel sometimes lands on the telegraph wire that runs above the stile, where it can see things moving through the opening below. A hole in the wire, low down in the fence, is the place where a lamb tried to climb through; got stuck and struggled, tangling his wool tighter until the barbed edge tore his skin. An elm sapling cranes over the gap in the hedge, its branches extended to catch spare light. Around the stile there ’s a patch of mud where feet have worn away the grass, and this is the fragile place where the rare, specialized, increasingly endangered flora of the footpath thrive in mud, shade, and the pressure of feet. The area below the stile is an underpass for badgers and foxes. The tall stone wall is a barrier to an extended family of rabbits, who make room and clear passage for their exploding population by undermining it.
Contis’s subjects are small but tough: stalks, seeds, pieces of grit, thorns, hairs tangled into the wire fence. I thought of Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf, a modest sixteenth-century watercolor of a clump of weeds and grasses. Dürer’s image could easily be described as photographic realism, but his attention amplifies his subject, so that the spent dandelion buds and thin blades of grass become spectacular, hyperreal. Contis’s images are like that: her subjects gain force when seen with this intensity. These are quiet places, but their quietness is suggestive. The worn paths and spaces between walls trace presence. The vegetation is lush, tangled, profuse. Everything leans into everything else, germinating, growing, subsiding, collapsing, and then regenerating. A landscape comes into being through encounters between soils and microbes, birds and chemicals, lichens and moisture, plants and mammals. A million different infrastructures, created by many species and successive climates, all built and perpetually building up into and against one another. You can look at any landscape like that, too: to find the many living storylines that come together in the present. Some are apparent, some are hidden, but they all make it what it is. Between your feet on the sidewalk there is a small basement where young men sleep on rotating shifts. From the top deck of the bus you might glimpse a lonely woman inside the state palace, sitting out long days behind drawn curtains, or the gulls on the palace kitchen roof, waiting for the food waste to be put out. Sunbathing on a suburban lawn on a hot afternoon you can feel, behind the back of your head, disturbed earth where a fox was clawing the ground for worms last night. The stile draws many different environments and experiences together, in the same place: it’s a stile, a scratching post, a gate, and a barrier. It’s a place to find something to eat, a hiding place and an escape route. It’s a gap, brought into sharp focus—emptiness, tended for a human body to pass.
Courtesy the artist
The landscapes themselves, spacious and closely inhabited, pass on too: they extend over the edge of the photograph and beyond the horizon. The plastic bag caught in the hedge here blows into a stream and floats downriver, out into the North Sea, drawn by circulating currents into the Atlantic and then the Pacific, where it joins other plastic bags all floating in an island together through turquoise waters. This tuft of reedy grasses is closely related to the marsh plants that emerge through the snowmelt in southern Siberia each spring. The wire fence that runs on either side of the stile runs on between the posts and away into the distance. The same wire fencing cross-hatches the moors and crosses down into the Dales. It runs through fields. It runs around a prison and a livestock market and runs on through more fields. It runs around migrant detention facilities and gated residential communities. It guards the train tracks at the entrance to the channel tunnel in Kent and resurfaces at its exit in Normandy. The fencing runs, intermittently, across Europe. Where the land meets the ocean there is a gap in the fence, and on the other side of the ocean, right there at the water’s edge, the fencing begins again. This same material—thick, square-hatched wire—runs riot around the freeways and border kiosks where El Paso meets Ciudad Juárez, it divides Syria from Turkey, Ukraine from Russia, Pakistan from Afghanistan, it has a field day on the Gaza Strip and runs on, circumnavigating the planet.
This essay originally appeared in Sam Contis: Overpass (Aperture, 2022).
Sam Contis: Overpass is on view at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, October 27–December 16, 2023