Colton Rothwell

"The American Mountain West finds itself under critical inspection in the photographs of Colton Rothwell. Elegy , a roaming collection of black-and-white images made across Idaho, where Rothwell was raised, and Montana, where he now lives, evokes the history of photography’s manifest destiny and New Topographics—particularly the photographs of Robert Adams—reinvigorated with a haunted and distanced unfamiliarity. Taking his queer identity as a starting point, Rothwell faces the mythology of the West and its imposed masculinity head-on, often through depictions of charged memories: a standalone cross in a field, the interior of a car, two shirtless men, a shared cigarette. “It’s often not what you’d expect to see,” he says, “queer people in the Western landscape and thriving.” The topography becomes animated as a character, its harshness acknowledged and summarily disarmed. As the viewer sits with the photographs, Rothwell’s vision of an imaginative West takes hold: an expansive landscape full of possibility."

-Eli Cohen in Aperture, Sept. 2023