Camden Art Centre presents an evening with artist Gary Schneider and writer John Douglas Millar, exploring the intimate intersections between photography, performance and portraiture in Schneider’s collaborations with Peter Hujar.
Signed copies of both publications will be available to purchase on the evening.
With thanks to the Peter Hujar Estate, Pace Gallery, and Maureen Paley.
“Salters Cottages (1981) is a 16mm, 16-minute film featuring performances by Peter Hujar, John Erdman, Suzanne Joelson and Gary Stephan. It is a fractured narrative portraying voyeurs and exhibitionists living in a cottage community on Long Island, outside New York City. The film was first shown in 1981 at The Collective for Living Cinema in New York. In 1984, Alf Boll programmed it at the Arsenal in Berlin, alongside Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour and Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon, two films that influenced mine. In 2022, Sophie Cavoulacos at MoMA programmed and acquired it.
In 2018, I gave a slide presentation at the Morgan Library in New York on being photographed by Peter Hujar in 1979. I also presented it at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Both talks accompanied Joel Smith’s exhibition Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. The Jeu de Paume launched my film stills book Salters Cottages, published by Dashwood Books in 2019. This talk later developed into Peter Hujar: Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom, published by my imprint, BookCrave Books, in 2024. It is a hybrid memoir, photobook and textbook, reflecting on my relationship with Peter and how he worked as a photographer and printer.”
– Gary Schneider
Gary Schneider is a South African-born American photographic artist. He makes portraits and self-portraits. His early work in painting, performance and film remains integral to his explorations of portraiture. He seeks to bring together art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual.
He has had solo institutional exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Reykjavik Art Museum – Hafnarhús, Reykjavik, Iceland; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; and the International Center of Photography, New York.
His work is held in numerous museum collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Iziko Museum – South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
John Douglas Millar is a writer who lives and works in London. He is currently working on a biography of the photographer Peter Hujar (Liveright / W.W. Norton, US, and Fitzcarraldo Editions, UK). His book of literary essays Brutalist Readings was published by Sternberg Press, Berlin, in 2016.
