REWILDING

That the images in Cass Bird‘s new book Rewilding are gorgeous and evocative will come as no surprise to fans of her luminous fashion photography and portraiture, although the provocative subject matter might come as a suprise. The photographs, taken over the course of two indolent summers in Sassafras, Tennessee, focus on a group of young women with, as Sally Singer puts it in the foreword, “fluid and button-pushing notions of sexual identity.” Bird, however, avoids the temptation to provoke, and instead brings the same nuance and sense of individuality to the pictures that she does to her more commercial work. The overall effect of the book is one of recognition, the women serving as representative reminders of the buoyant joy of estival American youth caught in our nation’s bountiful wilderness. They blissfully form a human pyramid in the warm rain, they cut each other’s hair amidst the tumbling green of a remote meadow, they roast marshmallows on the campfire. There are constant reminders of the amorphous boundaries of gender identity throughout, but even the most explicit of the images are less shocking than they are affecting.

Cass Bird’s Rewilding is out now from Damiani.

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