A death stare greets me as I enter peter campus’s exhibition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. A man looks right at me, dead on—or at the camera, really. His harsh eyebrows, thick yet articulated, add to the intensity.
I check the video’s title and learn that it’s a death stare of a different kind: Head of a Man with Death on His Mind (1978). The man swallows occasionally, blinks infrequently. Set against a white background, his face is nevertheless lit as if in chiaroscuro, recorded in black-and-white. Is he thinking about his own death, that of a loved one, or just general grief? At one point, his eyes gaze downward, as if he is looking toward hell or the grave, or is simply sad. It’s oddly arresting, given that nothing much is going on.
Campus made this work in his early 40s. I can’t help but think about how many of his peers—how much of the first generation of video artists—are gone now, and how death might be on his mind differently at 88 than it was at 41.
Roland Barthes described the camera as fundamentally linked to death. It enacts a kind of micro-death by freezing moments that are always already gone by the time the shutter clicks, and it’s always capturing someone or something that will die. Yet at the same time, photographs are special bridges, linking life to death—absence and presence rolled into one.
Head of a Man with Death on His Mind, of course, is not a photograph; it is a moving image. And yet, the movement is minimal. The video enlists its durational quality to thwart finality in one crucial way: there is hardly a beginning, middle, and end. The work cycles on an endless loop.
