Salters Cottages

An artist's book of stills from Salters Cottages, the sixteen-minute 16mm film Gary Schneider shot in 1981 at a summer cottage colony on Long Island, with Peter Hujar among its cast. Dashwood Books published it in 2019; Schneider dedicated it to Hujar, his friend and mentor.

The film's only sound is a Bell and Howell projector. It follows the voyeuristic and exhibitionist habits of the colony's residents, played by Hujar, John Erdman, Suzanne Joelson and Gary Stephan as the watchers and the watched, and Schneider made it as an homage to Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour (1950). Jerry Kelly and Schneider designed the book; Wilco Art Books printed the black-and-white frames in quadtone. Softcover, 124 pages, first edition of 1,000 copies. It was launched at the Jeu de Paume in Paris during the museum's Hujar exhibition, where the film was also screened.

Schneider (b. 1954, East London, South Africa) came to New York in the late 1970s from painting, performance and film. In 1981 he and Erdman, his partner, founded the printing studio Schneider/Erdman, where he printed for Hujar before his own long-exposure portraits and the Genetic Self-Portrait (1997–98) made his name. The library also holds Gary Schneider: Portraits (Yale, 2004) and his memoir Peter Hujar: Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom (2024).