New York-based artist Peter Hujar never encountered much
in the way of success in the course of his lifetime, explains Joel Smith, the
curator behind a new exhibition of his powerful photographs entitled Speed of
Life at that city’s The Morgan Library and Museum. Hujar was simply not a
self-promoter – a fact which placed him in stark contrast with his
contemporaries. His restrained nature was by no means due to a lack of
confidence, however. “I would say it’s exactly the opposite,” Smith continues.
“He felt that the work was so strong that it should speak for itself – it was a
temperamental disinclination to put himself forward. So when the work did not
go over the top without effort, I think this confirmed his worst suspicions
about the world. And when a photographer like Robert Mapplethorpe, who really
relished the opportunity to promote himself, made it straight up to the top,
and defined a new top for what a contemporary photography could do in terms of
renown, that also confirmed for Hujar that this world was not all for him.”
Disenchanted, Hujar turned to the East Village underworld
in which he felt himself to be most at home, and set about creating singularly
affecting photographs of the artists, writers and thinkers – a set of people he
considered the greatest of the era, but who also happened to be “simply his
neighbours, and the people that he sees two or three nights a week” – instead.
He died tragically early in 1987, at the age of 53, having contracted AIDS, but
the impact he made over the course of his relatively short career is still felt
today.
“Those who knew him the longest and the closest speak of
how funny he was, how well read, how playful, and how unpredictable – which is
to say that he could fall into depressions that really cut him off from the world,”
says Smith. “He was a very sensitive person, but on the other had a very tough
personality, as somebody who was used to rejection of various kinds. A central
fact about him is that he knows by the early 1950s that he’s gay, and that he
will not be accepted for that, and what he does about it is move out, at age
16, into an apartment of his own in Greenwich Village, which is the one place
that he could be where it would not be an issue. Because he did not present as
homosexual in any of the standard ways that that would have been visible at
that time, people took him as straight for decades of his life, and all of that
sort of informs his special role in a changed world. Once there becomes a way
of being out of the closet, he still continues to be the person he’s always
been.”
At that time his was a “secret fame”, Smith says – but in
the years since the world has learned more about him. Perhaps as a result, his
oeuvre has been reduced down to a few instantly recognisable portraits. Take
the 1973 shot Candy Darling on her Deathbed, for example, a quiet and serenely
sentimental image capturing the Velvet Underground muse reclining as though for
a restful moment in the final days of her life. Or, writer and political
activist Susan Sontag stretched out, gazing thoughtfully into the air above
her. “It’s altogether appropriate that [these images] are well known,” says
Smith, “but the body of work is so much richer.” In the interests then of
shedding light on lesser told elements of his story, here Smith shares four
images from the Morgan’s captivating exhibition about Hujar’s work.
Daisy Aldan, June 19, 1955
“The earliest exhibition print that we know of in all of
Hujar’s work is his portrait of Daisy Aldan, which he made in June of 1955.
Daisy was his high school English teacher at the School of Industrial Arts, and
a classmate of his from high school told me just last month: if you were
unhappy with your life and you wanted to become someone else, Daisy was the
person you wanted to know. She had been a radio actor as a child, she was a
poet, she was a translator of Baudelaire, she was very widely connected in
literature and the arts – and she really brought Hujar into the world of
culture, she’s the first adult who encouraged him in his art.
“This portrait is in a classic Avedon mode of its time,
it’s really where Avedon was at that moment. In fact, just this morning, I can
tell you that as I prepared to talk to you I looked at it in the gallery and I
thought ‘You know, this is a kind of performance’. It’s a very gentle, intimate
kind of performance, but what he’s doing is photographing somebody in action,
which he seldom does later on. It’s such a striking intersection. He is
channelling something very intentionally from Avedon, and the element of it
that lives on in his portraiture is the simplicity of the set-up. That’s really
what he got from both Avedon and Penn, I think – the idea that you leave the
sitter alone.”
Greer Lankton, 1983
“Greer Lankton had had her sex-change operation four
years before Hujar made this picture. She looks so fresh and so natural; to me
it’s a picture that doesn’t tell you how to feel about this person. It doesn’t
tell you to be suspicious about anything, about her gender identity. It’s not a
gotcha picture that says ‘Ah-ha! You thought you were seeing somebody born
female!’ It’s studiously neutral and yet, as glamorous in its presentation of
this person as can be. In that sense, I think it’s profoundly empathetic. It’s
really making gender the same kind of challenge or puzzle for us that it was
for Greer.
“It’s quite a lovely portrait. She was over the moon
about how the session had gone, and deservedly so.”
Hudson River, 1975
“The Hudson River picture from 1975 is one of a group of
pictures of the surface of the Hudson River that Hujar made to be placed in a
religious setting at Fordham University, which is a Catholic university in
Manhattan. They were all in different states, and sometimes you can see clearly
that the sun is reflected on a part of the water, but more often it’s quite
ambiguous, as in this image. This one has the least sense of its relationship to
a source of light. You have the clearest view of the water through the whole
thing.
“To me, it has a Zen quality to it; it’s a very
contemplative image. You could count these waves for hours. It reads as an
absence of all the things that I think people associate with Hujar’s work –
there’s not a person, there’s not a creature, there’s not a single thing inside
the frame. It’s just the endless world of nature that you’re seeing. At the
same time, he’s of course aware that it’s the Hudson River, and I think you’re
seeing a little bit of a building near the pier reflected in the left
foreground.
“This quality – you could call it spiritual, it’s somehow
about the same kind of practice of peacefulness that a lot of the dancers and
movement he photographed has about it – is something that I think is worth
recognising throughout his work. He’s bringing the world to a standstill for
the sake of his art form, which relies on stopping time, but at the same time
recognising that things flow on.”
The Untold Stories Behind Peter Hujar’s Lesser-Known
Works. By Maisie Skidmore. February 02, 2018.
AnOther Magazine
If portrait photography is stereotypically discussed
in terms of capturing something revealing or true about the sitter that can
only be seen with a camera, Hujar is making an argument for another function of
the portrait. He isn’t after Truth, but allowing people to be vulnerable, to
share something small of their private selves. Hujar’s photographic look is
tender.
I’m sure his work feels urgent to many of us right
now—especially those with bodies that are marginalized and threatened—for a
multitude of reasons, but it is this gentleness that stands out to me. Hujar’s
photography memorializes and monumentalizes acts of tenderness and moments of
vulnerability, things that lately feel less and less practicable and, for that
reason, more and more important.
Many of Hujar’s subjects are nude, or nearly so, as
though literally baring their souls or revealing their vulnerability to someone
they trusted. The sittings often took hours, and Hujar in a quiet, gentle
manner coaxed his subjects into relaxing and posing in unexpected ways. He even
photographed himself running nude in a bare studio, young and handsome.
He had a way with form. Sometimes just body parts,
legs. Or torsos, such as a reclining figure, sometimes on the diagonal. He also
clearly worked instinctively, intuitively. He challenged himself to intimately
explore his subjects, to tease out their secrets and their souls, through the
prism of the camera lens. Back then the camera told the truth, reflecting not
only the reality of the subject but also of the picture taker. The only
manipulations took place in the darkroom through dodging and burning areas of
the exposing paper, to lighten or darken for better effect, or by cropping the
image.
Hujar printed most of his photographs himself. A
black-and-white darkroom was fairly easy to assemble and maintain in a
semi-domestic setting. He took great care with the process in order to create a
finished print that met his standards. This included spotting the finished
product himself to ensure a clean image. The vintage prints reflect this.
Hujar felt like he was the end of a photographic
era—perhaps one of more formal images, intimate portraits, black-and-white
prints. A younger generation came up in the 1980s and took up color and quick
snaps, composed narratives, staged intimacies. And then in the future photography
became ubiquitous through the smartphone, and Photoshop replaced the darkroom,
Instagram the gallery.
A Formal Intimacy: Peter Hujar: Speed of Life. By Ingrid
Dinter. May 11, 2018. BOMB Magazine
Fran Lebowitz on the first time she met Peter Hujar…
“I met Peter in 1971, at a screening in Midtown. I didn’t
know who Peter was, but I saw this handsome guy, and I thought ‘there is Peter
Hujar’. He was very handsome, and this was one of his claims to fame. I saw
this very handsome guy wearing a rough tweed jacket and a woollen sweater. When
the movie was over he stood up, and he was wearing a skirt.
“This was shocking for numerous reasons. One, he wasn’t
the skirt type of guy – he looked really like a librarian, in the skirt. And
two, it was illegal to wear women’s clothes then, so even the people who wore
them routinely, they did not do it in Midtown. This was my first view of Peter.
I never saw this skirt again, but I did ask him ‘Why were you wearing a skirt,
Peter?’ And he said, ‘Because one day I thought, it’s not fair: women can wear
pants, why men can’t wear skirts?’ And I thought, ‘that’s the thing you think
is unfair?’”
On Hujar’s theories about his lack of success…
“Peter would think of reasons he wasn’t succeeding, and
they would be never the reasons why he wasn’t succeeding. For instance, in
Peter’s mind he wasn’t not succeeding because he threatened to break a barstool
over an art dealer’s head. He wasn’t not succeeding because (I believe) he
punched a woman dealer in the face. [Rather, he believed] he was not succeeding
because all successful people’s first and last names started with the same
letter, like Marilyn Monroe. This was the thing he was out for, for like a
year. And every time he would see you he would tell you. Those were the
reasons. He would say, ‘do you think I should change my name?’ And I was
saying, ‘no, I think you should change your behaviour’.
“So, we went to lunch, they were perfectly nice. And that
night he went to some bar with them, and he threaten to break up a barstool
over their heads, and consequently they did not give him the show. But not
because his name was not Marilyn Monroe.”
On his photograph of Candy Darling on her deathbed…
“Candy asked him to do that. You know, to take that photo
of her. He told me, ‘You wanna come?’ And I said, ‘Peter I don’t think you
should do that. I mean Candy is dying, that’s horrible.’ Candy was young, she
was 27 when she died, and even I thought that was young then, even though I was
like 23. He said ‘No no, she wants me to do it,’ and she did. So we went to the
hospital, someone did her make-up, her hair, and she posed for those
photographs. I thought it was horrible – not the photographs, fantastic! – but
I thought, I can’t imagine this is what you care about when you’re dying. But
this is what she cared about.
“And then when Candy died, Peter and I went to the
funeral together, which was at Frank E. Campbell, which was the fanciest
funeral home in New York, still is. It was winter, and when we got to the
funeral home, we went into the room where the body was, which is the first time
I ever saw an open casket. The casket was open, and on the back of it – it was
a very elaborate casket – there were these things, I think they’re called Mass
Cards, from the Catholic Church, they were there with the rosary beads, and
also these photographs of Candy, these publicity shots. Candy was in the
coffin, in full drag, in full make-up. And I was shocked by this.
“Peter was wearing his coat, and he was right behind me,
and all of a sudden he takes his camera and he takes a picture of it. And I was
so angry at him for doing this. I said ‘This is awful!’ He goes, ‘She would
have wanted me to do this!’ I said, ‘How would you know?’ And I think she
probably would have, you know. I think I fought about that with Peter for about
two days, and I’ve never seen that photograph of Candy dead.”
Fran Lebowitz Remembers Her Friend Peter Hujar. By Maisie Skidmore. June 28,
2018. AnOther Magazine
