To date, the American photographer Peter Hujar’s most well-known shot is his beautiful and melancholy portrait of Warhol “superstar” Candy Darling in repose on her deathbed. She is surrounded by flowers, a single rose lying by her side. Made in 1973 at her request, it is an artfully staged collaboration with, as Hujar later put it, “Candy playing every death scene in every movie”. A superstar, then, to the last.
The image is an intriguing one in the long arc of Hujar’s posthumous recognition, having brought him to the attention of a new, younger audience in 2005 when it featured on the cover of I Am a Bird Now, the debut album of Antony and the Johnsons. In its elaborate choreography, though, the Darling portrait is not really indicative of the impressive depth and breadth of Hujar’s work, which is on full display in Eyes Open in the Dark, an intriguing exhibition by the artist’s friend and printer, Gary Schneider, and his biographer, John Douglas Miller, at east London’s Raven Row gallery.
