Twelve Acres by Henry O Head

In his first monograph, American photographer Henry O. Head conjures the ragged contours of a formative friendship rooted deep in the Ozarks—where he came of age in a land half-wild and ungoverned. From the thaw of spring 2023 through the humid close of summer 2024, Head traced the backroads and hollers of northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri, returning to the towns of his youth: Ponca and Jasper, Purdy, Monett, and Pioneer. These are places where limestone bluffs rise like broken teeth, quartz veins pulse underfoot, and cottonmouths curl beneath sycamore shade while prehistoric gar drift slow and silent through creekwater the color of smoked glass.

Twelve Acres is a meditation on boyhood lived just beyond the edges of the map—past the reach of school bells, streetlights, and civic order. It’s a seasonal arc of hunger and stillness, where something untamed presses against the skin—a desire to outpace the creeping weight of adulthood and its quiet erosion of wonder. In Head’s hands, the landscape becomes a looking glass, catching glimpses of the past as it slips between forms: a smear of light, a branch snapping, the hush before a bottle rocket splits the air.

The world here trembles—part memory, part fever dream. Boys move like phantoms through the underbrush, their feet raw from creek gravel, their shirts singed by the drag of borrowed smokes, their laughter chasing down the sun. Twelve Acres doesn’t ask to be deciphered. It drifts, like a summer current, through the mystery of becoming—through bruises, through myth, through the high reach of trees and the freedom found in the unsupervised hours between dusk and dark.