“Photography,” wrote Susan Sontag in the introduction to photographer Peter Hujar’s 1976 book Portraits of Life and Death, “converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also – wittingly or unwittingly – the recording-angels of death.”
Sontag’s seminal essay is reprinted in the catalogue – produced in the form of a newspaper – for Peter Hujar: Echoes, an exhibition at the 125 Newbury gallery in New York’s Tribeca neighbourhood. It could hardly be more fitting for a show that turns an unflinching eye on permanence versus evanescence and brings to mind TS Eliot’s lines: “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.”
Hujar was a mercurial talent who slipped comfortably into the role of outsider. Born in 1934, he was raised first by Ukrainian immigrant grandparents in rural New Jersey then, from the age of 11, by his mother and her boyfriend in New York. It was an abusive household and he left at 16 to fend for himself.
Hujar eventually found safe harbour in the queer avant-garde of downtown New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. His photo “Come Out!!” was created as a recruiting poster for the first gay pride march in June 1970 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. His work was underappreciated in his lifetime but is now gathering critical esteem.
“Peter was always around with a camera and always very intense and separate from the group,” says Arne Glimcher, founder and director of 125 Newbury, as he contemplates Hujar’s gleaming black-and-white images. “He took his art very seriously but he was not interested at all in people making him famous. He really shunned that so it hurt his career but it worked for him.
“The body of work is so serious and so unlike anybody else’s. Diane Arbus and people like that were coming up at the same time and they were very flashy and out there but Peter’s work is so different in that the work has compassion. Sometimes I think Arbus’s work victimises the subjects – those photographs were not her world – but this is his world and all of the subjects are treated very lovingly, not cynically, and he’s trying to get the most beautiful aspects out of them.
“He deals with very tough subjects and it was hard then dealing with the subjects. So I wanted to make this show not of the celebrity portraits – Susan Sontag is not in the show – but of these more ordinary people that were friends of his and that he’s photographed in the studio.”
Glimcher, who founded the Pace Gallery in 1960 and represented the artist Paul Thek, who was Hujar’s boyfriend, opened 125 Newbury last year as an experimental space to pursue his own tastes and interests. Visitors who stroll down Broadway and step inside leave the city heat and cacophony of traffic behind to find a cool sanctuary currently populated by Hujar’s ravishingly cinematic prints.
Hujar is best known for portraits of artists, dancers, drag performers, musicians and writers from New York’s bohemian subculture, but Glimcher wanted to do something different. The exhibition contains more than 30 works spanning 1966 to 1985 and combines two strands. First, there are images that Hujar made of friends, lovers and acquaintances who posed for him inside his loft on 12th Street in the East Village.
Second, there are candid pictures that Hujar took while cruising the dilapidated Christopher Street piers on Manhattan’s far West Side (theorist Juan Esteban Munoz described them as a “cruising utopia” for gay men outside the mainstream gaze) and in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Italy, in 1963 on a trip with Thek.
Glimcher says: “This is a show that’s never happened before. Play these slick, beautiful, almost Pan-esque figures against the scrofulitic walls of the buildings on the piers and how they work together and how they tell you about the time, about the secrecy of this world – that’s what fascinated me.”
With that Glimcher walks across the gallery to a wall displaying Gary Schneider in Contortion I and II, both depicting its nude subject in extraordinary positions. He says: “These acrobatic images are really spectacular in that they’re so transformative. Is that a Western Pepper or is that a body? I’m very fond of these. The subject was his assistant printer who has subsequently printed posthumous works.”
Further along is Daniel Schook Sucking Toe – a young male nude with long hair, toe in mouth, eyes gazing unselfconsciously at the camera. Glimcher comments: “It’s a kind of astonishing thing to photograph and it’s not only about a boy sucking toe. It’s about personal intimacy and this is not sensational.
“It’s amazing certain subjects like this don’t come off as shocking or sensational but incredibly composed, printed so beautifully. When you look around, the range of colour in the photographs from charcoal to a kind of sepia – he pulls this kind of rainbow of colour out of black and white.”
Set against youth and beauty are images of decay and intimations of mortality. Cow Slaughter I, Germantown, New York depicts a cow carcass hoisted upside down with a shimmering monumentality. “You can think of [French painter Chaïm] Soutine. You can think of Rembrandt’s ‘Slaughtered Ox’. He did a whole series of animals and they are extremely tender. This is a really tough picture because he could sympathise with the cow. It still has such a sweet face.”
Another picture shows a beaten-up chair, its emptiness registering the absence of the body. Then there are the piers, where gay men cruised and made exquisite art, all long lost to the wrecking ball – yet preserved in Hujar’s prints. Glimcher says: “Here’s artworks, installations, graffiti in the interiors of your piers on these scrofulitic walls. It all comes to life as something extraordinary.”
Oliver Shultz, senior curatorial director, has been listening to the conversation and weighs in: “There’s this moment after Stonewall and before the Aids crisis. The piers are a kind of utopian space and, because they’re on the margins of the city, no one cares what happens there. Unlike gay bars, which are being busted by the cops, you can go and be free.
“A lot of artists did installations in the piers. People painted on the dilapidated surfaces of decaying buildings of the piers. Gordon Matta-Clark did some of his most famous cut-outs, ‘Day’s End’, in the piers. It was this space of radical possibility.”
Hujar was not approaching these subjects as an observer or voyeur but as active participant. Shultz continues: “The photographs bear a very direct relationship to the spaces they document. Yes, they document these spaces but they’re not documentation. Hujar was always so deeply and intimately involved with his subjects.
“That was one of the things that always distinguished his portraits, that he was interacting with them and there was this rapport, this intimacy between he and they. This happens on the piers, too. He wasn’t just walking around photographing people there. He was cruising the piers so he was involved in this life.”
Shultz turns to the images of the Italian catacombs. “That body of work, yes, it’s obviously about death but it’s also about this joy in the materiality of the body. In that way it’s elegiac but also looking to the future, like the persistence of the body through photography, because in fact we all die – even those of us who don’t die untimely deaths from a pandemic or a plague or a horrible illness like Aids. But photography lets us live forever.”
The pictures now feel like a foreshadowing. Hujar died of Aids-related pneumonia in 1987 at the age of 53, one of numerous New York artists cut down by an epidemic that Washington was trying to ignore. His boyfriend at the time was David Wojnarowicz, who would become a leading member of the Aids activist organisation Act Up.
Shultz reflects: “I think Peter’s death in ’87 catalysed some of David’s protests and very impactful public actions on behalf of Aids awareness and policy. Eighty-seven was still relatively early in the epidemic and ‘Silence = death’ as the motto of Act Up was so profound because people weren’t talking about it.
“Outside of the queer community, they were just afraid and were shying away from it until the early 90s and the work of people like David Wojnarowicz. In a funny way, even though Peter wasn’t involved in these overt protests, he really did play a role in galvanising a younger generation of folks in that community to stand up and demand that this be addressed.”
And the pictures persist, entirely of their time and yet entirely timeless. In her introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, Sontag wrote: “Fleshed and moist-eyed friends and acquaintances stand, sit, slouch, mostly lie – and are made to appear to meditate on their own mortality … Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.”
Peter Hujar: Echoes is on display at 125 Newbury in New York until 28 October
