Overpass is about what it means to move through the landscape. Walking along a vast network of centuries-old footpaths through the English countryside, artist Sam Contis focuses on stiles, the simple structures that offer a means of passage over walls and fences and allow public access through privately owned land. In her immersive sequences of black-and-white photographs, they become repeating sculptural forms in the landscape, invitations to free movement on one hand and a reminder of the history of enclosure on the other. Made from wood and stone, each unique, they appear as markers pointing the way forward, or decaying and half-hidden by the undergrowth. An essay by writer Daisy Hildyard contextualizes this body of work within histories of the British landscape and contemporary ecological discourses. In an age of rising nationalism and a renewed insistence on borders, Overpass invites us to reflect on how we cross boundaries, who owns space, and the ways we have shaped the natural environment and how we might shape it in the future.

In this book Sam Contis presents a new window onto the work of the iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange. Drawing from Lange's extensive archive, Contis constructs a fragmented, unfamiliar world centred around the figure of the day sleeper - at once a symbol of respite and oblivion. The book shows us one artist through the eyes of another, with Contis responding to resonances between her and Lange's ways of seeing. It reveals a largely unknown side of Lange, and includes previously unseen photographs of her family, portraiture from her studio, and pictures made in the streets of San Francisco and the East Bay. Day Sleeper will be featured alongside other works of Contis' in the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the Museum of Modern Art, February-May 2020.