Bryan Schutmaat

Henry O. Head: Twelve Acres

A haunting photographic return to adolescent mysteries in the Ozarks In this debut monograph, American photographer Henry O. Head reimagines the peaks and valleys of a defining teenage friendship in the Ozark hills where he spent his adolescence. From spring 2023 through summer 2024, Head revisited the terrain of northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri—wild country with limestone bluffs shot through with quartz, where cottonmouths coil on exposed roots by slow creeks and alligator gar glide like phantoms through the dark. Twelve Acres recalls a boyhood outside city limits, away from institutions and the pressures of social order. In a progression through the seasons, a restlessness presses in, a longing to stave off the rupture of entering an adult reality, with its mundanity and responsibilities. In this meditation on personal history, worlds quiver in a chaos of past and present forms and stark flashes of image begin to wobble in an opaque well. Tops spin. Animals with thirst cup liquid light. Memory remains an ineffable mystery. Twelve Acres is a reverie, wherein the past reemerges as boys with tick-bitten feet, ears ringing from homemade explosives, clothes stained by the smoke of shoplifted cigarettes and arms stretched toward higher branches.