"Spencer Wells is an American photographer and filmmaker who lives in Marin County, California.

Raised in the Midwest, Wells relocated to New York City at the age of 22. While there, he developed a keen eye for the built environment and the sundry ways it complements and conflicts with the human beings who have built it. Since relocating to Northern California, he has incorporated a newfound sense of the pastoral into his work, one which reflects his youth in the wild hinterlands of Wisconsin. This collection of photographs encompasses the urban, the rural, and everything in between.

Regardless of where these images were made, they are united by a common theme: beautiful clothes. Wells’s photography speaks  not only to the garments on display, but also to the lives of the people who wear them. These images make a viewer desire something more than a product, something deeper and closer to the heart. A cursory glance reveals any number of high fashion hallmarks, from luxe polo coats to perfectly-executed tuxedos to Paraboot derbies. Whoever these people are, we know one thing for certain: they know how to dress themselves. In that sense, Wells is ahead of the game—beautiful art starts with a beautiful subject (just ask Warhol). But the practice of photography is about more than pointing a box at something pretty and pressing a button. The camera takes the image; the artist makes the image.

Why bother to drive out to the Sonoma coast and pick through the brush up dusty switchbacks to make a photograph when you can simply ask a computer to do it for you? The answer, as you see in Wells’s work, is self-evident. Every photo in this collection is the product of manual work done by the artist himself, either in the camera or a dark room. Not a single imperfection has been clone stamped away in Photoshop, nor a single slider adjusted in Lightroom. Wells’s approach is tactile, methodical, utterly painstaking. Efficient? Not necessarily—but honest beyond reproach. Wells alone is responsible for every step of the process, from conception and composition to exposure and enlarging. He is, in the truest sense of the word, the author of these images.

Wells is also deeply attuned to the particulars of his chosen medium. The idiosyncrasies and limitations of film photography are on full display here. Note the light leaks in certain images, psychedelic shocks of red and gold that are the product of intentional exposure of the negative during shooting. Other images are framed by sprocket holes, small perforations along the edge of a filmstrip by which a camera advances the film. Particularly notable are Wells’s collages, in which multiple strips of film have been deliberately arranged and enlarged onto a glass plate. By distilling the motion of many images into a single still image, Wells applies the cinematic technique of montage to photography, forcing the viewer to consider where exactly the line lies between a picture and a video.

Such an approach is decidedly old school, but Wells isn’t a simple Luddite reactionary—what is a camera, after all, but a piece of technology? Rather, his work is a testament to the power of the truth. In an era of simulation and misdirection and deepfakes, these images are records of reality. They are incontrovertible: real shadows cast on Parisian streets, real rays of sunlight illuminating California creeks. The world may not be this beautiful for much longer, but it was at one point, briefly. See for yourself."

-Ian Grant