Clay Mills’s Heaven Looks Like a Frat Party / The Pearly Gates Are Sticky: Inside Clay Mills’s Mythic Youth

© Clay Mills

When I first saw the word “Baudelaire” on Clay Mills’s website, I braced for a character straight out of a French New Wave fever dream—part Pasolini, part Trip Fontaine, maybe even Christian from Moulin Rouge. But Mills is neither an aesthete in silk and leather nor a tortured dandy. He’s grounded, sharp, and genuinely interested in trying for a direction at the messy intersection of film, photography, literature, and youth.

His book, Heaven’s Like a Frat Party, is a raw and riotous chronicle of a young man’s manic engagement with life. Shot between 2019 and 2022, it draws from the chaos of Mills’s college years, film set work, and aimless nights that aren’t quite parties, but somewhere in between. He’s not interested in documentation. He’s interested in myth: “Party photos feel too personal and direct,” he says. “I wanted to create some distance and turn the people I was photographing into characters.”

Creating Meaning After the Moment

Mills’s roots are in filmmaking, and you can feel that cinematic residue in the photos—portraits that read like stills from a movie you can’t quite tell if you saw. Though his background gives him technical fluency with cameras, he’s quick to diminish any claim of mastery. Photography, for him, was a way out of the stress of film: “It’s less coordinated. I could be more intuitive. It was like gambling—just shoot and hope something hits.”

That looseness is strategic. He shoots a lot, and “most of them are bad,” he says, laughing. The real work comes later—during editing and sequencing, where accidental meaning begins to emerge. His influences here are literary: André Breton’s thoughts on surrealist technique echo throughout Mills’s process. “Breton said automatic writing was fine for generating material, but you still have to take responsibility for it. That’s where the work really begins.”

In Mills’s case, responsibility takes the form of pairing and sequencing—turning a mess of half-thoughts into something with resonance. Some of the most unexpected meanings, he says, came after the fact: “One of my friends only ever appeared next to images of doors. I didn’t plan that. But once I saw it, it felt symbolic, even psychoanalytic.”

© Clay Mills

Between Beauty and Excess

If Breton is in the sidelines of Mills’s process, Baudelaire glosses the content. Heaven’s Like a Frat Party takes its cue from the damned poet’s obsession with modern beauty—fleeting, messy, even grotesque. “There’s this poem, Crowds, where Baudelaire looks down on the city and sees all this ugliness—but to him, it’s beautiful,” Mills tells me. “When you photograph something ugly, you’re transforming it. You objectify it. It becomes something else.”

That tension—between what’s traditionally beautiful and what becomes beautiful by force of attention—guides much of his visual logic. There’s joy in the blur and in the in-between. He doesn’t shy away from excess; he aestheticizes it. But not to romanticize it—he’s not selling transcendence. If there’s a heaven in Mills’s book, it’s just this world, reframed. “The book’s about happiness, but in a manic way,” he says. “Leisure, motion, in-between moments. Not fulfillment. More like, almost.”

© Clay Mills

Intention Is Overrated (But Craft Isn’t)

One of Mills’s more provocative stances is on intention: “If a work of art is completely reducible to the artist’s intention, I feel like it’s probably not very good. It has to go beyond that—maybe even violate the original intention—in the way people actually receive it.” This perspective is both liberating and challenging. It resists didacticism, but insists on precision—especially in editing.

This doesn’t mean he works blindly. His decisions—what to include, how to pair images, what tone to maintain—are deliberate, even if they don’t announce themselves as such: “I try to avoid photos that feel too obvious. I don’t want to lock anyone into one interpretation.”

Still, Mills doesn’t dismiss technical skill. In fact, he’s frustrated by the way many art schools have abandoned it: “The de-skilling movement did real damage. At SAIC, when they merged the film and video departments, a lot of technical knowledge got lost. That kind of anti-craft attitude—it’s dangerous. Technical mastery isn’t everything, but without it, you don’t even know what’s possible.”

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© Clay Mills

On Community and the Limits of Solidarity

Though his work revolves around recurring characters, Mills resists the language of community. “I’ve been around a lot of scene-y people,” he says, referencing Denton, Texas’s band-heavy art circles. “Whenever people talk obsessively about community, it often just means insular infighting or a group of people propping up each other’s mediocrity.”

He quotes Chekhov, who once refused to sign a petition about artistic solidarity: “Just because someone’s an artist doesn’t mean their work is good.” That skepticism bleeds into Mills’s approach. Art, for him, is solitary—less a group project, more a compulsion. “When I let someone in, it’s because there’s mutual trust. But it’s personal.”

The Weight of Influence (and the Need to Ignore It)

Mills is acutely aware of the intellectual legacy he’s inherited—from modernism to postmodernism, from Barthes to Foucault—but he’s not beholden to it. “You need historical consciousness, sure,” he says, “but you also have to tune it out to make something new.”

That contradiction—between knowing the canon and refusing to be boxed in by it—sits at the heart of Heaven’s Like a Frat Party. It’s a book that doesn’t claim to have answers. Instead, it lingers on the act of looking. A photograph, Mills suggests, is an encounter: not a declaration of meaning, but a provocation of it. Provocation. Provocation. Provocation. 

I had to clean up my questions before interviewing Clay; I wanted to provoke a Baudelarian. I wanted to see if he was actually a photographer or if he was acting the part. I was blazed when I met him, quickly changed my tune, a one-time sparring match turned lesson on grace.

© Clay Mills

Heaven’s Like a Frat Party may be filled with fleeting, chaotic moments, but Mills’s approach is anything but careless. What emerges is a body of work that resists easy interpretation, invites projection, and asserts that meaning is not made in the taking of a photograph—but in the strange, post-rational act of arranging, noticing, and occasionally abandoning.

I guess that’s what heaven may look like, why not? A blurry youth, a flash of light, someone grinning out of frame. If it’s not in the frame, it’s more interesting.

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