peter campus, circa 1987

Peter Campus, a restless and too-often-overlooked pioneer of video art, emerged from a circle that included Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt and Robert Grosvenor. During the early 1970s, influenced by Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman, he mounted installations using then-nascent video-editing technology to layer and dissolve images, as well as closed-circuit cameras that confronted people with images of their bodies screened at odd angles. Later in the decade he turned to still photography, realising large projections of dimly lit faces that dominated gallery spaces and bore down on viewers with an enigmatic and confrontational intimacy. He showed in New York at Klaus Kertess’s seminal Bykert Gallery and then with Paula Cooper; but he withdrew from the scene in 1979 and began taking black-and-white photos of landscape details that, at the time, seemed old-fashioned.