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 this is on display in this landmark exhibition at Raven Row, the largest UK showing of his work to date.
They’re tender, peaceful, enigmatic photographs
The first two rooms largely focus on portraits, some anonymous, but many of them denizens of New York’s bohemian queer scene and celebrated public figures. There’s William S. Burroughs, head resting in one hand as he reclines on a bed, his piercing gaze both rueful and disaffected. Performance artist Stephen Varble pouts on a SoHo street, staring out from underneath an elaborate costume made of fishing net and fake ‘None Dollar’ bills. Drag artist and playwright Ethyl Eichelberger stares at the camera, poised and contemplative, face half obscured by shadows. There’s another print from the aforementioned shoot with Candy Darling just a few months before her death from lymphoma, her huge eyes black with sorrow as she lies in a hospital bed. They’re tender, peaceful, enigmatic photographs.
Among them are anonymous street figures, animals both dead and alive, black-and-white photographs of detritus strewn across the streets of Manhattan and Pennsylvania, nudes of friends and lovers, landscapes from road trips across America, self-portraits through the decades. Hujar’s use of light is impressive, particularly in the photographs shot outside. The textures of blankets and bedsheets, the wattles on a turkey’s neck, wrinkles and pores are rendered in brilliant detail. He manages to make the most ordinary of subjects beautiful.
Also impressive is the variety of work on display. One room focuses on the huge range of photographs captured by Hujar in a single day, as he travels across Manhattan shooting congregations leaving church, close-ups of the waves on the Hudson River, street kids and gay men loitering and cruising by the piers, Manhattan’s skyline from the top of the World Trade Center. A photograph of the Easter Sunday crowd on the church steps outside St Patrick’s Cathedral is particularly brilliant, full of action and life.
It amounts to a deeply moving depiction of a lost community
But there’s a lot of death, too. Not just because of the sheer number of his subjects who also died during the AIDS crisis. There are dead cats and dogs, dead flowers thrown onto plainly marked graves. And Hujar himself, in Wojnarowicz’s unflinching close-ups of his hollow, vacant face and blackened fingernails, taken seconds after his passing. It amounts to a deeply moving depiction of a lost community and a lost New York.
This exhibition is a timely one, coinciding with the imminent portrayal of the artist on the big screen in Peter Hujar’s Day, an Ira Sachs-directed two-hander based on a book by Hujar’s friend Linda Rosenkrantz. Starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, the film got great reviews when it premiered at Sundance in January, and will receive a wider release later this year. The exhibition’s co-curator, art critic John Douglas Millar, is also hard at work on a forthcoming biography that will be published through the prestigious imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions.
A mere four decades after his death, it seems that Hujar is finally getting his dues as a major force in 20th-century photography.
