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.
In the next room, there are four videos of the landscape where campus lives on Long Island. These too are still-yet-moving images played on a loop. Immediately, I feel the ways that time passes differently for the rocks and the rivers than for that man, the one with death on his mind. Together, the four videos comprise the philips quartet (2023–24) and consider “the special light on eastern long island,” per campus’s statement in the accompanying catalog.
View of peter campus’s 2026 exhibition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
Photo Lee Stalsworth
The artist has long been concerned with self-reflection, but also self-effacement—as seen in his lowercase letters and in his most iconic work, Three Transitions (1973). In one scene from that greatest hit, he appears to erase his own face, only for another video of his face to appear underneath. The video shows the artist using editing tricks in obvious yet magical ways. He keeps disappearing, as if made of and returning to dust. The special effects are seductive without feeling tricky: you are made to see the seams, to see the artist’s hand, and this is infinitely more exciting than sneaky movie magic.
In the catalog, John G. Handhart—a leading video art curator who came up alongside campus, and who organized this exhibition—describes his fascination with late-style pieces, campus’s in particular. He writes that campus’s new works embody the synthesis of his oeuvre. And indeed, 50 years on, looking to the land becomes a way to take that self-effacing humility even further. One video from the quartet, blessingway (2024), was made during a solar eclipse and takes its title from a Navajo term for harmony in oneself with nature. Another work, there somewhere (2023), was made when campus walked into the shallow waters “search[ing] in vain for something, unsure what, until i was just lost inside it,” as the artist describes it. Reflecting on a life’s work, he adds: “i started with a great ego eager to make my mark; reflecting on it all today i feel profound modesty.”
