The only book of his work published in his lifetime in 1976 to little attention, Peter Hujar's "Portraits in Life and Death," considered a cult classic by some, has been reissued by Liveright Publishing/W.W. Norton & Company.
The collection, with new digital scans from Hujar's original negatives, is illuminated by an excellent essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Benjamin Moser (Clarice Lispector and Susan Sontag). Coincidentally, Sontag contributed the essay for the original, reprinted with this revival. Sontag's essay is what one might expect: elegant, opaque, and self-referential, affirming kinship with Hujar's perspective aligning with her own.
Moser's introduction connects the photographs' subjects by their outsider status and marginality, including sexual orientation, and bohemian underclass poverty, illustrated by a Hujar self-portrait, leaping gracefully in a decidedly ungentrified loft of peeling paint and thread-bare rugs.
Fashionable, eventually
Avant-garde ambitions are apparent in retrospect, but fame and fortune were not paramount goals of these individuals then, although several became well-known, even successful. Moser catalogs their destinies: five died of AIDS, including Hujar; some like Divine and Sontag died of other causes like disease; "T.C.," the stripper, leaves no traces, and a few, like John Waters and Fran Lebowitz, are among the living.
Moser states that the times, culture, and tolerance have caught up with Hujar and his coterie, "How, in just a few years, gayness would become fashionable, and then with what in retrospect seems fantastic speed, unremarkable. It is another indication of the hygienic function of time: as time can burnish a work of art, it can also expand the views of marginal people, and render their way of seeing comprehensible, even desirable. Because gayness has been so domesticated, it is hard, now, to imagine how different certain Hujar pictures looked in their own time."
Even, he suggests, the phallic extraordinaire image of Bruce de Sainte Croix, which was on view in a recent Berkeley Art Museum exhibit, and not hidden away in an office, as it was when it first appeared in the "Nude Male" exhibit two years after publication of this book.
Moser is a superbly elegant writer, his talents on full display in this thorough introduction, but I wonder if he's perhaps in a cultural/geographical bubble. Born in Texas, he now resides in Utrecht, the Netherlands. How else to explain the previous quotations that unfortunately suggest Hujar's still bold imagery (in my opinion) is toothless, even passe.
Besides Waters and Lebowitz, "Life and Death" luminaries include Divine, Charles Ludlum of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, and Sontag. Actor Jose Rafael Arango could be Dracula in a wonderfully creepy photograph. Arango repels and seduces with elegant blackened eyebrows, sensual full mouth, and pinky ring.
Hujar posed many of the subjects reclining, most staring back at the photographer, and us. No artful, flattering lighting or suggestions of narrative; minimal black, white, and gray. An astonishingly youthful Waters, wearing his trademark pencil-thin mustache, lounges provocatively, almost parodying the conceit of making love to the camera, whereas Divine looks rather pensive.
Peter Thek, Hujar's lover (we're told his amorous relationships usually evolved into friendships) and a better-known photographer at the time, appears struggling to stay silent, conversation interrupted. Posing shirtless and prone, Hujar appears muscular and trim, ruggedly handsome. He had earlier been included, after all, in Andy Warhol's movie "The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys," a compilation of Warhol's "Screen Tests," four of which had featured Hujar.
Voids and Silences
Moser writes cryptically that "Hujar feared being remembered as a gay photographer, but a photographer who was gay." And while many of his most iconic images are of men, he also made several photographs of women alive with agency and obvious intelligence, as well as beauty.
Sontag herself, in the photograph that became famous, appears poised and queenly, playfully indulgent, gazing skyward. The artist Ann Wilson personifies stylish wit and intelligence, in contrast to the well-known image by Richard Avedon of sculptor June Leaf, shakey like her name. The mysterious T.C. offers herself to the camera like Waters, all ripeness and ease. A young, fresh Fran Lebowitz, lit cigarette in hand, wearing rumpled white shirt and pants, stares Hujar down, impassive, not exactly confrontive but certainly not coy, either.
Hujar's posthumous fame, orchestrated by his zealous executor, novelist and literature professor Stephen Koch, underscores the tragedy that his career was cut so short, only another ten years of working after this book.
Some of his most memorable images were yet to come, like Candy Darling on her deathbed, and the "Come Out" Gay Liberation Front march after the Stonewall riots. He was also yet to meet and photograph David Wojnarowicz, who became his partner (sexual in the beginning), collaborator, and subject.
Both had rough starts in life, like orphaned, feral wolves: Hujar was the child of a waitress and father he never met, raised by grandparents in New Jersey speaking only Ukrainian. After moving to New York City to live with his mother and new husband, "an alcoholic bookie named Snookie, he left, at age sixteen, after his mother threw a bottle at his head." Both Hujar and Wojnarowicz succumbed to AIDS, Hujar first in 1987, age 53, Wojnarowicz, only five years later in 1992, age 37.
Palermo and Death
What must have made the volume arresting in its first appearance, and even today, are the portraits of the living, from the years 1974-75, followed by images of the dead, from the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Italy, taken earlier by Hujar in 1963. In the memento mori tradition, the desiccated, moldering corpses display remnants of clothes, even flowers; some are posed in groups, like tribunals, juries, or victims of catastrophe.
Whereas Avedon gained notoriety with portraits of decrepitude and decay, life slipping away, with Hujar in this collection there's no in-between the vibrantly alive and the dusty dead, like a book with chapters ripped out, a bald comment about inevitable endings, even for the once most gloriously alive.
Moser and Sontag make a case for Time, ruthless and remorseless though it may be, erasing irrelevancies and dross, leaving art of the stature of a Hujar burnished and deepened over time. 'Eternal' may be a cruel myth, but Hujar has a shot.
Peter Hujar's 'Portraits in Life and Death,' $75, 100 pages.
www.wwnorton.com
Peter Hujar prints, and the 2022 catalog book 'Peter Hujar curated by Elton John,' are available at Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary St., 4th floor. www.fraenkelgallery.com
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