Heaven's Like A Frat Party, You Just Gotta Know Someone — Clay Mills

From the Photographer:

Heaven’s Like a Frat Party, You Just Gotta Know Someone compiles pictures I’ve taken between 2019 to 2022. 

These are primarily pictures of my friends and places we’ve spent time in. Repetition of people and the movement across a brief period of time gives one the impression that these photos follow a singular gang of boys romping across a haunted America — the world’s been left behind yet they must live on. 

Many of my friends in these photos have never actually met each other, they come from different places. Reconciliation is found in their occasional intersection — ghosts rediscovering ones they once knew while still alive. In an empty world, these brief encounters catch a glimpse of a manic happiness in a sea of sadness — the impossible picture of fulfilled life in an unfulfilled world. 

Often in these pictures my friends are only looking. They’re permitted to observe but never alter. Soon their youth will disappear, and the static world they haunt will survive them. 

Who are my friends? They are not the members of the eponymous fraternity — rather they’re people who can enter anywhere, yet are never fully integrated into their environment. When a brother knows you at the door you’re in, but all night you’ll be asked, “who do you know here?” The promise of the title is that they might find refuge anywhere a familiar face can be found, but just refuge. Wuthering Heights — “heaven did not seem to be my home.”

These photos are precious and funny and evil to me, they’re doorways to a memory of a life I did not myself live. My photos could perhaps be called “youth photos,” if that description is adequate to what Baudelaire tasked us with: to capture, “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life… often weird, violent, and excessive.” 

Clay Mills is a photographer, filmmaker and writer originally from Texas, now based in Chicago.  He photographs modernity, taking pictures of the “ugly” as if it was “beautiful.” Clay’s photos have been derided by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Curator of Photography as “like Cartier-Bresson taking the decisive moment, but [instead] taking the indecisive moment.”

https://clay.dead.homes • https://www.instagram.com/claythemills