Aaron Robey’s BACK SHOTS stages the nude male body within the rugged expanses of the American Southwest, where queer desire meets wilderness, primality, and solitude. In a moment saturated by highly edited digital images, Robey turns instead toward something more immediate and raw. Shot on a point-and-shoot film camera, these photographs embrace the fleeting encounter between body and landscape, attending to the tension between erotic presence and inhospitable terrain.
Made with the help of his husband, the series places Robey himself as both subject and muse: a lone, exposed figure set against barren desert roads, rocky outcroppings, and alpine vistas. These images hold together eroticism and distance, humor and vulnerability, fantasy and documentation. Rather than inviting the viewer into a staged erotic encounter, BACK SHOTS lingers in a different register, asking us to pause, breathe, and take in the charged relation between body and landscape. In Robey’s hands, the desert becomes a site of queer exposure, intimacy, and freedom.
4x6 inches.
Limited-Edition Archival Pigment Prints.
Available at 2026 LA Printed Matter.