Peter Hujar – ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’
By rights, Peter Hujar should be far more famous than he is.
Born in New Jersey in 1934, the photographer was a contemporary of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, and a close friend and sometime lover of Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz. He rubbed shoulders with countless artists and literary luminaries, photographing everyone from Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag and Wiliam S. Burroughs to Greer Langton, John Waters and Cookie Mueller. Pretty much anyone notable in the thriving art scene of downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s was acquainted with Hujar.
But despite being enviably well-connected, he didn’t achieve much in the way of mainstream success before his death of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987, exhibiting rarely and producing just one photobook (1976’s Portraits in Life and Death) during his lifetime. Even posthumously, he’s mostly been recognised by association with other artists; a striking portrait of the dying transgender icon Candy Darling is famed for its use as the album artwork for Antony and the Johnson’s Mercury Prize-winning album I Am A Bird Now, while an anonymous 1969 portrait titled Orgasmic Man is instantly recognisable as the cover art of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel A Little Life.
Yet Hujar’s photographs should be known in their own right. Not only was he a masterful documenter of the scene in which he operated, but a multifaceted photographer with an exceptional command of light and composition and a sensitive, compassionate eye. All of...